Twits for Twitter

On All Things Considered last night, Laura Sydell did a long overdue (only because every other fatuous technology reporter did it last month) review of Twitter, the service that lets you tell all your friends exactly what you're doing at all times. If I had a penny for every article hailing Twitter as this year's YouTube, well, I would probably have at least a dollar. Twitter is for people want to share everything about their lives, but, in Ms. Sydell's words, "don't want to commit to a fully thought-out journal entry". Instead, they want to share 140 word (max) chunks of information about exactly what they're doing right now. I don't know about you, but I don't want to constantly hear the minute details of your life and and I don't know why you'd want to hear mine, certainly not until I'd digested them a bit and taken the time to come up with some intelligible thought, rather than a "twitter". Aside from the inanity of the service*, I think the thing that bugs me most is how many journalists are hopping on the bandwagon and insisting that this is the new hot thing (well, unless they're writing paeans to the iPhone). Either way, Twitter has my vote for most over-hyped new service of 2007.

*I tried to find something to like about Twitter and the only thing that seems remotely amusing is the fact that it lends itself to a new art form - Twitter Haiku. Here's apparently a real one:

very crazy day
please don't ask me about work
folks, seriously

Not a lot of redeeming value (especially since in spoken English you'd elide the second and third syllable of the last word and end up with a 4-syllable line instead of 5 as a Haiku demands) but it's as much as I could find.