Shona Ghosh

You know those couples who suck face on London Underground? That’s the frankly revolting way in which the media behaves with social technology. Morbid fascination with MMORPG World of Warcraft was swiftly followed by a brief flirtation with LolCatz until finally we married Facebook. This is a solid partnership occasionally supplemented with liasons with Second Life and, bizarrely, Rick Astley. Threatening, however, to topple Facebook in novel meeja communications came Twitter.

Twitter is the kind of heady midlife-crisis romance which excuses any idiocy, including using ‘tweet’ as a verb.

Twitter started off as quite a nice idea. So did communism. Usability News puzzled over its pointlessness, while New Scientist blogger Will Knight sums it up thus:

Twitter lets you post very short messages (140 characters or less) to describe what you’re currently up to. You can let friends know – or just announce it to no-one in particular. And you can post and receive messages via email, IM and even a mobile.

Mobile is the key word here. Short of clicking through 20 friends in your phone’s address book, what other way is there to hint at your unbearable loneliness get people to the pub en masse? Awesome device.

Naturally I caved. No more unbearable loneliness multiple texts! I used Twitter as a way of creating in-jokes with a select group of people I pretty much saw every day anyway. But its main appeal was vanity, said InformationWeek:

Twitter provides a public billboard for users’ interior monologues.

Kind of like an online version of writing on the wall, in fact. So much so that Obama has 111,371 online followers and McCain has…4,512. Make of that what you will.

But Twitter sounded its own death knell when it announced that status updates made online would no longer be delivered to followers’ inboxes – no longer mobile, in short:

Beginning today, Twitter is no longer delivering outbound SMS over our UK number.

Oh. So…back to unbearable loneliness mass texting to get people to the pub. That’s not to say you can’t twat tweet online still – but there’s no immediate thrill of someone texting back. So now, as far as I can see, Twitter is almost entirely useless. Its mobility was one of the few things which appealed to its fast-paced users – there’s nothing here which can’t be offered by a simple Facebook status update.

Twitter fails to cope with user demand. Again.