It seems that everyone is talking about Twitter and how incredibly useful it is but I don’t buy it.  I am all for simple and clean interfaces, I mean honestly it’s what made Google so popular.  However, a little bit of depth could go a long way into making Twitter one of the most useful social tools the web has ever seen.

To Tweet or not to Tweet?

I love coffee, I really do.  In fact I love coffee so much I even have a blog about different blends that I like.  Twitter allows me to access thousands of people with which I can send a simple post on the new flavor that I am trying out this morning if I so choose to.  But I won’t.  Why you may ask?  Because who gives a flip about what blend of coffee I like? You know who cares about what type of coffee I like?  Coffee lovers.  Now I could spend a lot of time trying to find people who are interested in coffee and communicate with them about it, but who has time to do something like that?  Furthermore, coffee is only one of the many things that I like.  I also like Indie music.  Say I want to send all the Indie lovers out there my newest find?  Sure, but they will also be getting updated on what’s giving me my current caffeine buzz.

Give us some categories for crying out loud!

Most of the time, I really don’t care if someone is going out to dinner with their girlfriend/boyfriend or anything of that nature.  If I want to see what my friends are doing that night I should be able to simply click the “general” tab and happily watch as the list populates itself with random Tweets about their awesome plans for the night.  If I am looking for new and ever so tasty coffee blends that I should try, then I should be able to click the “food and drink” category, type in the tag “coffee” and drink away.  In other words, I should be allowed to view what I want, when I want and not have to wade through mountains of useless Tweets to get there.

Is this possible?

Yes! The technology is already there.  All Twitter needs to do is look at sites like Delicious with their awesome tagging system.  By doing this, they can narrow down the virtually limitless categories to only a few main ones, thus keeping the simple nature of the interface.  They could also make categories an optional section so people can choose whether or not to use it.  Now I have a choice.  I could post my coffee blend to my whole list so that everyone can enjoy it or I can post it to the 50 or so friends who actually care and could use the information.  More importantly, this can help me if I want more exposure to my blog.  Now if my fellow coffee connoisseurs want to learn more about the blend I mentioned they can simply go to my blog and find out all about it. This is not to say I don’t love Twitter.  I think its simplicity is one of its greatest facets.  However, I do think the program could use a little depth so that those of us who want to narrow down our Tweets to more important information, are allowed to do so.

This post is a part of Probloggers Killer Titles Contest

Like you, I subscribe to numerous RSS feeds and read hundreds of articles a day trying to educate myself with the massive amounts of information that has saturated the web.  The problem is that most of what I am reading is blog fluff that the top guys are churning out to keep their daily feed rates up.  More and more I began wishing for a site that would only have useful information that I could actually use instead of having to sift through hundreds of articles hailing themselves as the most useful pieces of information ever and containing nothing of the sort.  I mean, how many articles have you read containing the title, “How to Cure Writers Block”, and containing tips such as “walk around the room to clear your head”.  Fluff I say!  Where is the meaty info that I really need to survive in this industry?  Why are all the top talents wasting our time with pictures of what food they ate at some random convention that we don’t care about and probably never will attend!  Most bloggers are writing part time in the hopes that maybe someday one of their blogs will catch on and they will finally break free from their boring office jobs and start living large. 

What are we paying you for anyways?

Sure I may not be making any profound statements here myself, but I am also not getting paid 100k+ a month to write these articles!  I feel as a community we are too forgiving and make excuses for them like “well it’s hard coming up with new content all the time!”  I would agree if it wasn’t for the massive amounts of money they make each year off of the blogs that we support.  For that much money they should have fresh and useful content that never includes the phrase “I have been too busy with my business to post good things lately”.  Too busy to post to a blog that makes you millions? Really?

Blogebrities?

The problem is that we are addicted to these blogs.  We are putting these people in the realm of celebrities and sit around waiting for them to do something big.  We will subject ourselves to wasting time reading these things again and again because we are all hoping for the golden egg to land in our laps like it did for them.   I honestly hate blogs that post every day because I know there is no way each and every article is going to be worth my time to read.  But I will anyways.  I will because these people are the celebrities of the blogging world.  Like celebrities in the movie biz, all of us will sit and wait for them to do something big and then talk about it like it was the most profound and life changing thing to ever grace us with its presence.  We all smack our heads as yet another obvious tip that we hadn’t thought of gets thrown at us… but only after reading a series of useless dribble time and time again.

The Solution?

I have this nagging feeling that the blogging bubble is about to burst.  If you think about it, blogging has not been around for all that long and only recently is making a boom.  Many top bloggers really only remain there because they were some of the firsts to offer advice about blogging and we all subscribed to their feeds.  We need to break our addiction from these blogs and finally admit to ourselves that when it is all said and done… they really aren’t that good.  We have built an emotional attachment after reading so much of their material but it’s time to move on.  They have had their time and made their millions.  There are better blogs out there we just need to spend a few minutes and find them.