Heeeeee-eeey, as the Fonz would say, Twitter is still cool, but sharing how cool you are all the time on Twitter – well, some of us are getting tired of it.
Today’s New York Times has a story called On Twitter, ‘What a Party!’ Brings an Envious ‘Enough Already!’
With another SXSW (aka “spring break for geeks”) now history, the story does a round up of annoying tweets from the festival where digital media types hang out side by side with folks from the film and music industries. Obviously this is a recipe for clogging up Twitter with Tweets about celebrity sightings and Twitpics of crowded clubs where folks are eight-deep at a bar trying to score a Shiner Bock. (I know, I was at SXSWi last year – when the rumor at the time was that the interactive part of the fest itself had jumped the shark.)
Sure, some of this is jealousy on the part of those of us who didn’t make it down to Austin this year (or other events like TEDx and the World Economic Forum in Davos). All of these types of conferences were one-time places where gathering new information from industry thought leaders was the objective. We used to “live blog” these things in the mid-2000s to impart what we were learning back to friends and colleagues who might not be at the conference, or at another session. But 140-character Tweets have replaced lengthy real-time blog missives and that’s the complaint.
It’s a lot easier (and more attention-getting) to Tweet “And … I’m eating a taco next to Danny DeVito. #sxsw” than to try and condense the key points of a keynote. And, like the Fonz and his Happy Days sitcom, for a couple of years, eating a taco next to Danny DeVito was very, very cool. But now it seems that the taco has donned a pair of water skis and is midair – jumping the shark.
Source: New York Times, On Twitter, ‘What a Party!’ Brings an Envious ‘Enough Already!’ by Amy Harmon.
Kathy Drasky regularly writes about online culture. Her marketing and communications work with the ANZA Technology Network, Advance Global Australians and with various Australians and Australian enterprises has led to at least a dozen trips Down Under.
An accomplished digital photographer, her photos have appeared in 7×7 Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle and Google Schmap.
