To Twitter or not to Twitter

Recently, Maureen Dowd wrote an op-ed piece in the NY Times (To Tweet or not to Tweet) about her disdain for Twitter. She went and interviewed the peeps that created the site where, in 140 characters or less, one can convey what one is doing to friends and other followers. In the piece, she called Twitter a "toy for bored celebrities and high-school girls."

Maybe she's just jealous she's didn't come up with the simple yet powerful concept. Maybe because she's just a twit?

Maybe Ms. Dowd is just too old school to understand the usefulness of Twitter, its simple and to-the-point functionality. It allows one to be succinct, direct, to the point. Superfluousness is not allowed (the word 'superfluousness' would take up most of the 140 characters alone!). It causes one to become a better writer, to force one to think and be creative.

Maybe she should get a Twitter account.

But she won't. Why? Because she thinks Twitter is for people to share their experiences of eating burgers or to post highlights of funerals and whatnot.

Nevermind that organizations such as NPR, CNN, NBC, ABC and a host of others utilize the technology of 140 characters per tweet. Maybe she doesn't get that people are in more and more of a hurry and don't have time to read her diarhea of the wordprocessor and would much better get the gist in a sentence. If she used Twitter to convey her opinion of Twitter, it would probably read something like this:

MDowd I think Twitter sux. I wouldn't be caught dead using it. Back to my long-winded columns. #twittersux

That was only 101 characters. Well under the 140 character limit and certainly right to the point of her op-ed piece. And a lot more entertaining, too.

You go, Maureen. While Twitter gets bigger and bigger and that remnance of a tree you call a newspaper becomes thinner and thinner, you'll soon be typing a paragraph on a bar napkin hoping someone picks it up off the floor to have a peek.