Twitter- the emperor’s new clothes?

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I have had a twitter subscription for about 18 months and I have 16 updates. At a rate of one a month that is pretty poor microblogging. I have always had the opinion that it isn’t for me. At one stage I had one member of my team in London and the rest in the Netehrlands and we tried to use it as a team building exercise, to make sure that everyone was in the loop with everyone’s activities, and build some team spirit in that way. This kind of fizzled out, but I’m not sure if it blame twitter or lack of motivation for that.
Twitter has received a lot of funding, interest from Facebook to purchase it and just recently the amount of people that I know using it has started to increase exponentially. This increase in interest is not limited to my social group, if you look at the search traffic for twitter it has had a huge boost since December (Nielsen in the US has seen 1382% UU growth from Feb 08- Feb 09). I think the relaunch of the new “twitter-style” Facebook has had an impact, and then there are a number of other pop-culture things (some rapper was live twittering whilst singing on the Jimmy Kimmel show). Its sneaking its way into the mainstream, and I’m nothing if not a slavish follower of trends, thus I think its perhaps time for a reappraisal…

I think the reasons it didn’t appeal to me are;
1) Its essentially a vain exercise, I’m not sure how many people want to know that I’m brushing my teeth.
2) Its very disruptive- by its nature it’s a consistent barrage of information , and it will break my concentration on whatever you’re focused on.
3) I didn’t have any friends, so if you’re chatting into the ether, it isn’t very rewarding
4) Most of all I haven’t received any tangible benefit from it; social, business or anything, so why put anything in.

I read (and twittered ) a great post from Tony from Zappo’s about why he uses twitter and why it is such a lifechanging force. I think that everything that Zappo’s does is pretty great (aside from not sending me their culture book when they said they would), so I’m going to devote the next six weeks or so to trialling twitter. Please leave your twitter and I’ll follow you, I’m @brendanmc
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