I've spent about a month on twitter.com. I've come to some conclusions about it's usefulness and lack thereof.

Twitter is billed as some kind of social networking site. The idea is as you go through your day you ask yourself, "What am I doing?" then you post the answer at twitter.com. What you end up with is a running microblog of your day.

Other twits (people who twitter) can respond to your posts and you can respond to theirs. You can choose to "follow" people and their tweets (twitter posts) will show up on your account page at twitter.com. If you're truly obsessive, you can have other peoples' tweets texted to you on your phone.

Everyone who signs up for Twitter eventually writes a blog article telling how cool it is and by extension, how cool they are for doing such a cool thing. This is my contribution to the noise.

What's Good About Twitter

• If you are an interesting public person at all, it gives people a little view into your hour-by-hour, day-by-day life.
• It's a good way to make other people think you're accomplishing something (you can just as easily text "in meetings all afternoon" from the back nine as the conference room).
• It augments your sense of self-importance. If you have a bit of an ego going, there's nothing like having a bevy of minions following your every post, and to have one or two of them choose to have your tweets texted to them immediately is tweetastic.

What's Wrong With Twitter

• One of the most disappointing thing has been seeing the minute by minute schedule of powerful people I previously admired. To see how much time they waste doing irrelevant or inefficient things is depressing.
• If you reply to other twits' tweets, your replies are intermingled with your other posts. If you're trying to maintain a little microblog like I'm doing at blog.laridian.com it becomes messy and confusing to readers. If you don't reply to other twits, they say you're missing out on half the "fun".
• When other twits reply to you, it's not obvious to you. Their replies show up on your home page at twitter.com, but if they're prolific tweeters, or if you're following a large number of twits, the comments are easy to miss. This is disappointing since social interaction is one of the big marketing bullets for Twitter.
• The self-discovery process is humbling and depressing. First, the realization that your life isn't as fun-filled and exciting as your customers, friends, family and business associates might have thought it was can be disturbing. Second, coming to the realization that the whole reason anyone would do this is that it makes them feel like other people really care about the minutiae of their day is eye-opening. I know I don't really care what everyone I'm following had for breakfast or did all weekend so why would I think they care about my eating or recreational habits?
• If I know about it, it can't be cool. There are other things I know about that are no longer cool. Burning Man. Star Wars Kid. Emo. By the time we 40-something white guys find out about a cultural phenomena, it's past its prime by definition. I twitter, therefore twittering sucks.

Twitter is a waste of time.Yet here I am, doing it. All I can say is I can't disappoint my many fans.