When it was reported that a building at the Hillcrest Apartments caught fire this morning, there was a large explosion of tweets and re-tweets and even re-ret-weets all over the local Twitter-sphere.  To me, this signals two things have happened to Twitter: I follow too many people, and too many people tend to re-tweet without a second thought to signal to noise.

Is this the fault of Twitter for failing to provide a filter so that people who have seen one tweet won’t see a retweet? Or is it a lack of “twittequette”? Or is it something else?

Whatever the case, I was glad to quickly find out what the source of the black smoke I saw was, but I was also amazed and disappointed at the congestion it caused on Twitter.

When you accept the fact that Twitter is Evil Incarnate, all will become clear.

You’re absolutely right, as far as I can tell. I think it’s mostly a lack filtering, and just following too many people who really aren’t offering all that much. To make Twitter even remotely useful for incoming information, you have to follow only people that don’t post time-wasting, inane tweets. And even then, you really need something like Tweetdeck to make it really useful.

That said, I avoid using Twitter whenever possible. Most of the time I use it, it’s to check things like @dhoststatus to find out if the reason all my sites are down is because I did something stupid, or because Dreamhost is having downtime. Most of Twitter is just noise, and I really can’t get see how anyone could make sense out of it unless they were following specific people’s tweets, or specific hash tags, and never even bothering with the rest.

I use it to spread disinformation and lies about my enemies. It is quite useful for that.

i use it to sell drugs

Twitter is a tool, and if you know how to use it, it will work for you.

You either get it, or you don’t.

@ThunderPig (Tweeters know what that means..LOL)

It’s a handy little device designed to drum up web traffic and that is all. Fobes is a genius for dubbing it citizen journalism and figuring out a way to make it seem worthwhile.