What She Said

Retweets are a great way to share with your followers the tweets of people you follow. They’re a nice way of saying, “Hey, you said something interesting, and I want my followers to meet you.” And, for those devoid of original thought, retweeting something helps them feel as if they’re contributing to the global conversation.

And then, there’s retweets like these where the thread breaks down irreparably like an electronic version of the telephone game, and we wonder, what exactly did she say?

5 Tweets Nobody Wants to Read

This is our top 5 list for today. It will probably be different tomorrow. Every day, new people discover twitter, and bring all kinds of new things on board. Some will be wonderful. Some will be disastrous. We’ll be here to sort them for you.

The five things we are absolutely, completely, and totally so done hearing about are:

1. What you ate for breakfast/lunch/dinner/snack or hope to eat for breakfast/lunch/dinner/snack, or what you’re really hungry for, for breakfast/lunch/dinner/snack. Here’s a tip: if you tweet about what you brought for lunch, and it’s gone by the time you check the fridge, someone close by is watching your stream. The rest of us, unless it is absolutely awesome, and it’s an invitation to join you, really don’t want to know.

2. How many tweets you’ve posted. Sigh. This is so obvious, it’s painful. We can see your totals by looking at your twitter stats, or clicking your name in TweetDeck, or Seesmic, or whatever. Tweeting is not rocket science. The only equipment required to post a bunch of tweets is time and a keyboard. And talent? Seriously, have you read the public timeline?

3. Where you are right now. Yes, there are lots of applications that will let you update your twitter account with your current location. Nobody really cares where you are, except for the guy who’s waiting to rob your house.

4. Twitter is down, or over capacity, or you couldn’t post for 5 minutes. Sit back from the keyboard. Take a deep breath. This, too, will pass. When twitter is over capacity and you tweet about it, you are part of the problem!

5. Inspirational quotes, one-liners, old jokes, witty sayings, quip of the day, and every other trite bit o’ garbage that people tweet when they have absolutely nothing to say, yet feel the need to post just so people will know they are still alive. If every one of those hackneyed phrases were connected end-to-end, they’d circle @Oprah’s equator about 100 million times. If you don’t have an original thought, it’s okay to say nothing at all.

We haven’t forgotten spam. Everyone hates spam, so we really didn’t need to mention it. Except we just did. There are about 80 zillion other things to add to this list. Stick your favorites in the comments.

We gotta go. It’s just about snack time, and we’re going to have…

Nevermind.

Way to Reinforce the Stereotype

Seriously, Dude, you’re the one giving twitter such a bad reputation. Here we are, working our tail feathers off trying to get people to love twitter and use it well. Every day, people who have never been on twitter come to us and say, “I really don’t care what somebody else had for lunch.” Just when we have them nearly convinced that awesome things happen on twitter, you go and screw it up. People see your stream and say, “I told you so.”

You have ruined twitter for all these almost-newbies, because they’ll never sign on. That means they will never laugh at @shitmydadsays, or marvel at the number of fake @Britney accounts.  They will have to do actual research for their next project, instead of polling their followers, and will be stuck using their mobile phones for plain, old-fashioned texting.

These poor folks will be doing something altogether different when twitter goes down again. They will have conversations that are longer than 140 characters, and will never learn to be pithy and succinct.  This is all your fault.

Do us a favor, please? Throw in an inspirational quote every now and then. Tell us what cute thing the cat just did. Link to a twitpic of your shoes. Complain about your mom, or boss, or spouse. Tell us how bored you are. Embrace twitter in all its awesomeness and banality, and maybe you can redeem yourself.

One more thing: nobody really eats fruitcake. Now we know you’re just playing us. Cut it out.

Amateur

Talk to the hand

Twitter is an awesome place. Once you’ve made a few friends, your timeline gets filled with all kinds of interesting conversations as you make connections, brainstorm creative themes, and post cool links to share with others. It’s easy to get stressed if you try to keep up as your timeline refreshes with hundreds of tweets every minute.

Some people find this overwhelming, especially when seeing tweets from people that rather not talk to.

If only twitter had tools to deal with problems like this. It could be something as easy as allowing users to not follow people they don’t like. Or, maybe, if twitter is working correctly (and that is the key), they could put in some kind of button to block the offender, so they never have to hear from them again. That would be sweet.

Now that we think about it, it probably wouldn’t work. Some people wouldn’t find clicking a block button to be final enough. Luckily for them, they can still get satisfaction from having the last word.

No, you shut up.