Twitter suffered a denial of service attack this morning, millions of users (including me) got cut off from the service and you want to know something? I didn’t give a tweet. In fact, it simply acted as a reminder to me how useless I believe Twitter really is and inspired me to truly contemplate my place not only in the Twittershere but also on the Internet as a whole.

Twitter is useless

I keep trying to come up with reasons to use twitter but for all the simplistic reasons I can come up with, I can’t actually find one ‘killer app’ excuse for me to use the popular micro-blogging service. I know there is one, I just can’t seem to find it.

Friends of mine use the term “low signal to noise” ratio when talking about twitter but what they’re really saying is that for every reasonable, quality message you receive you get thousands of pieces of rubbish which to me, means that most of the time, it’s nothing more than a distraction.

I solved this a while back by writing my own Twitter interface, basically it’s a web page that fetches my Twitter feed and converts it to an RSS feed which I then read with a news reader … minus 1,790 of the roughly 1,800 people I follow.

That’s right … I don’t really follow you, your tweets go straight to my trash but don’t take it personally, it’s me not you. Frankly I felt it was rude to not follow you (after all, you follow me right?) but then after I started following you, I realised that the vast majority of what you tweeted about was:

1. promoting your latest _____ (book, website, get rich quick, porn project)
2. promoting yourself
3. talking about your lunch
4. or simply, really … really dull.

Funny thing is, there are lots of openly commercial people and companies that I follow but they usually make it worth my while, offer timely information or do something worth tuning in to which I believe has led me to a few basic rules when it comes to Twitter.

1. Direct messages don’t work (too much spam, too little time)

2. If it’s worth telling me, you’ll email me (too much spam, too little time)

3. I don’t care that you just beat your high score on an Atari 2600

4. I don’t have time for Twitter

That last one is the most important one, unlike email and Facebook I simply don’t have time for Twitter … the grass is too green, the lake too blue and the wind has the smell of something too summery to be bothered Tweeting about things …