Twitter Considered Harmful

Okay, so I’ve been trying to use Twitter, and I’ve decided that it’s damaging the internet.  Here’s how:

• Mostly arbitrary and irrelevant 140 character limit.  This only applies to SMS users, which I believe there are very few off.  All hardcore people either use m.twitter.com, a regular browser, or a custom client for their (i?) phone.  Arbitrary per-character limits are so 1990′s.
• bit.ly (and other link shorteners) links that are required duo to the 140-char limit inevitably lead to “what the hell am I about to click on” syndrome.  If we didn’t have the totally arbitrary 140 char limit, this wouldn’t be an issue and we could use regular URLs.  Being Rickrolled every once in a while is fun, but frankly, I want to see what I’m clicking on most of the time.
• Lack of markup.  Again, the 140 character limit makes it impossible to have reasonable (any?) markup and thus, all links are in plaintext, etc.  This sucks and is more like the internet from the 1990′s.  I’d like to use markup instead of *bold* and /italics/ and _underlines_ please and thank you.
• @foo syntax (@ = in reply to) are beginning to appear on other sites, and have little to no meaning in most contexts.  I frequently see “@myfriend” style wording in other sites, forums, blog comments, etc.  This is unacceptable, as the syntax pretty much blows except for when using twitter.com, where the “@” links actually become active.  When I don’t know who the “@” is actually referring to, it’s doubly pointless.  Things like “@barakobama way to go dude!” are also pointless.
• #foo syntax.  Essentially the same argument as the previous one.  Don’t do this, and, the “#” sign is actually useful in some contexts.  For example, if you tweet “I got #1 at the trivia contest!”then the “1″ is a hotlink to searching for the tag “1″ which is totally pointless.
• Passive followers see nothing but a noisy one sided conversation.  I really don’t actually want to hear my friends saying “@importantguy Your socks rock in my boots!”   Especially when I don’t know “importantguy” and I could care less about your socks.  Thanks for trying.   Following most people on twitter reminds me of the feeling of listening in to someone’s phone conversation on the bus or train.  Pointless.
• Lack of interoperability.  Twitter is essentially a closed network and won’t interconnect with any other microblogging sites like laconi.ca, or Facebook status messages (although many sites like loopt, will gateway messages into Twitter, and others like Friendfeed and Facebook gateway messages into their own walled gardens).  This is unacceptable.  Interoperability is key. (take Jabber as an example).
• Search?  Everyone is abuzz with trying to solve the “Twitter Search Problem”.  For me, this is back to the 140 character limit.  If an average word is 7 characters and search terms are 2 words, (14 characters) then this is already going to be 10% of the resultant matches.  Is this “term to result” ratio really useful?   Since twitter messages are so inherently content-free due to lack of space, then why is searching useful?
• Shrtnd txt b/c of the arbtry 1hundrd frty char lmt.  Ths has drct impct on srchablty snce cmmn wrds & trms wnt appr in twits
• Just another userid and another login to another site (twitter.com).  OpenID please?  Why do I have to craft a new identity for myself again? A new username? A new profile pic? A new password? No thanks.
• People who want to be followed by zillions of other people for seemingly no reason.
• No one has anything interesting to say anyway.
• Very poor archiving.  In contrast, this blog is a great archive of my life, my thoughts, and the things that mattered to me over the years.  Am I really going to want to read “@wifey: Heading to the store, I’ll pick up some tampons for you.” in 10 years?  In 10 minutes?
• The proliferation of “sidecar” twitter sites is staggering.  These sites offer “extra features” like links (bit.ly) pictures (twitpic.com) or external twitter search or news sites (twitter.alltop.com), etc.
• The “Twit” / “tweet” naming scheme pisses me off.  See twitpic.com, snaptweet..com, twitxr.com, etc. for examples.