anirudhchandrakant

Twitter almost never gave me anything interesting. The noise to signal ratio was too high and it was too much trouble trying to find that diamond in the coal mine. The mine was too dark, there were not enough search lights and i didn't really know where to look. Maybe the gems were strewn all around me, but they were just too hard for me to find.

Twitter promised me conversations. It lied. I would reply to someone's tweet and they would only reply to that hours later. By then, i would have lost interest in continuing any conversation. I had painted pictures in my head about conversations like birds chirping in the morning; imagined music in the cacophony; thought about whispers late in the night. Twitter let me down - not only were conversations painful, discussions with groups of people greater than 2 was almost impossible. You picked me up only to crash me down, T.

Twitter was stingy. I could never say anything meaningful in the meagre 140 characters. I had to include a hyperlink to another place. I noticed that almost anyone who wanted to say anything remotely interesting also did the same. Was it a link sharing service? Don't we have them aplenty already? Because of it being niggardly, people misunderstood Twitter. They thought it was a social network, when it was a micro blogging platform. They thought it was a place to meet old friends, when it was actually a place to express oneself. It wasn't facebook, but nobody believed it. And as the world descended into sms-speak once again, it was time to alight.

Twitter was also too demanding. It wanted too much of my time and attention. The more people i followed, the harder it became to comprehend if anyone was real; much less what anyone was saying. Constantly fighting to keep up with all tweets, i found myself exhausted and disillusioned. I wanted my space. I wanted out.

In a different world, at a different time, maybe things might have worked out. Maybe, if Twitter allowed me to actually have conversations, if it allowed me to follow topics i was interested in and not just people i didn't know, if only people took 'followers' less seriously and did not make it an ego trip, if it did not sink into spewing spam and marketing gimmicks, maybe if following more than 20 people did not mean drinking from a fire hose, maybe, just maybe, if there was a purpose to all this.

Till then, Twitter, can we be just friends?