pop-culture for the people

I’ve been a user of Twitter for some time now and I’ve come to an unfortunate conclusion.  Unless you are Britney Spears Twitter is mostly useless.

Twitter is currently the most popular of a series of micro-blogging and social networking services.  What you get when you sign up for your free account is the ability to send and receive short (140 character long) messages to and from your list of “friends”.  You can “follow” other people, meaning you will receive any messages they post.  In essence it is a web version of SMS text messaging on your cell phone (and in fact can direct messages to cell phones).

Twitter first gained a lot of popularity amongst tech-heads and has since gotten a lot of press from big name tech journalists who have touted its use.  Most of these tech journalists have used the service as a secondary method of drumming up interest in their stories.  Interestingly the service has seen a shift in interest to more mainstream media and even many big name celebrities from the initial technorati as it has grown.  Yes even Britney Spears has a Twitter account.  Many big name corporations like Comcast and Carls, Jr. are exploring the use of the Twitterverse as an alternative method of communicating with their customers.  Twitter is now so mainstream it is being mentioned on the evening news and as I write this very sentence Jon Stewart just mentioned “tweeting” on the Daily Show.  Big name Twitterers even compare their stats to see who has the most followers, a sort of nerdy pissing contest.

Those who think they are getting closer to celebrity Twitterer need to realize that, like television, it is a one way street, a cheap communication channel for them to reach (advertise) to their fans.  Just don’t expect much.  Most of the big name Twitter users simply aren’t listening to your tweets.  Unless you have a number of friends who use the service you are likely writing short messages into a black hole.

For most people there isn’t much of a reason for anyone else to read your tweets unless you are a content producer of some kind.  Face it, nobody but close family is interested in what you just ate or that you are at home petting your dog.  You would be better served by sending a text message on your phone to your friends or use a service like Facebook instead (which most of your friends probably are using anyway).

Currently there is a deluge of good blogging and social networking services.  Twitter, like Facebook, has discovered that the two often go hand in hand.  This is probably part of the reason why Facebook is currently interested in purchasing Twitter.  The problem with so many choices right now is that people are likely to pick one and stick with it unless a majority of their friends leave.  It is simply too much effort for most people to use more than one service at a time.  This is why you saw a mass exodus of Livejournal to Friendster to MySpace to Facebook and Twitter.  But Twitter is (currently) too limited in its capabilities when compared to Facebook.  Twitter is like Facebook in that it has all the same features except the useful ones like hosting photos and videos, and creating and being part of groups.  If sharing information is the point of social networks then Twitter is the stingiest of the bunch.  Perhaps thats why celebrities and corporations like it so much.

I have strong doubts about the long term future of Twitter in its current form.  Though it is still receiving rounds of venture capitol funding it hasn’t made a single dime making any money right now nor has it announced any business plans.  I fear that once the venture capitolists realize there isn’t a business plan at all they will pull their money out.  Twitter’s popularity will ultimately being its downfall as bandwidth and server costs will quickly swallow their remaining funds.

UPDATE: This cartoon perfectly sums up my feelings about Twitter.

-Hollywood

This day makes me proud.  Thank you America.

As I write this, it has been almost two weeks since Hurricane Katrina, a category four hurricane, blasted its way through New Orleans and the Mississippi gulf region.  If you listen carefully, thouth, you can still hear lots of hot air being blown around.  You can also see the recovery effort underway; not by the National Guard in Louisiana, but by President Bush’s public relations machine.

I’m not a comedian so I can’t produce a biting satiric commentary on the debacle.  If you want to see that, go watch The Daily Show - they’re doing a fine job.  But I still feel the need to say something, anything, about what’s going on in this country right now.  I remember reading an article in one of last year’s National Geographic magazines, explaining in eerie detail what would ultimately transpire in New Orleans two weeks ago.  They said the levees would break.  Check.  They said massive flooding would engulf the city.  Check.  They said that thousands upon thousands of people would be trapped in their homes, on their rooftops, waiting to be rescued.  Check.

What the article didn’t predict was our response after the storm passed, and that’s because human nature is far more illogical than mother nature.  Who would have known that our nation’s leader, instead of calling upon our resources to rush to the scene and rescue the endangered, would remain on vacation, go to birthday parties, and play the guitar, while an American city filled with water like a soup bowl?  Who would have known that FEMA’s director, a former president of an Arabian horse club, would not fill out the paperwork to send troops to New Orleans until well after the storm hit, and would schedule those troops to arrive four days too late?  Who would have known that the chief of Homeland Security would claim that news anchors’ reports from New Orleans’ Convention Center, where thousands of refugees were left without food or water for days, were just rumors and anecdotes? 

Just who the hell is in charge here?  The unsettling answer is, apparently, no one.  While no one in the administration wants to play the “blame game” right now (and as Jon Stewart said the other night, the people who don’t want to play the blame game are always the ones to blame), there is plenty of it to go around.  Why not start with the top: Mr. Bush.  Once Dubya realized there might be something going on (through the help of his advisors, no doubt), he thought that a sightseeing trip over the burning, drowning city of NOLA would be enough to quell the anger over his inaction.  In Washington, he gave a speech that sounded like a sixth grader giving a book report, filled with meaningless statistics about millions of water bottles, thousands of MREs, a few Snickers bars.  When THAT wasn’t enough, they finally decided to cart Dubya down to “Ground Zero,” which ended up being a hangar in which helicopters and troops who should have been saving people were diverted to become a nice backdrop for the big guy’s photo op.  And what did the big guy have to say?  “Brownie, you’re doin’ a heck of a job.”  Gad, I love my eloquent president.

“Brownie,” of course, is Michael Brown, the director of FEMA, the organization that is charged with protecting us from disasters such as…hurricanes.  Just make sure that you’re not in a hurry.  As I mentioned, Brownie’s prior emergency experience involved making sure the manure was shoveled off the Arabian horse stage as quickly as possible, so obviously he had the credentials to protect a sinking city from a cat 4 storm.  He signed paperwork late; he said that the Convention Center tragedy would not be resolved until he knew it was “factually happening,” even though live pictures were on the news for the past two days; he blamed the disaster on those stubborn people without cars who just wouldn’t leave the city before the storm.  Whatever was happening, it obviously wasn’t HIS fault.  Thankfully, it no longer will be: earlier today he was “reassigned” from the Katrina rescue effort.  Just reassigned; Bush doesn’t fire people.

This will probably mean that Michael Chertoff, director of Homeland Security, is also safe in his job.  Homeland Security has swallowed FEMA into its bureaucratic belly, so even though they may not have gotten to the refugees in New Orleans quickly enough, they most assuredly have all kinds of paperwork filled out in quadruplicate explaining why.  During that awful week after the storm, Chertoff also claimed that the Convention Center problem couldn’t be confirmed, so we were all left to wonder why Harry Connick, Jr. was able to reach the people there, but not the military.

Why?  Why?  That’s the question that scares the hell out of this administration right now, and their only hope is that we get tired of asking.  They will stall as long as they can, because they know the answer.  It wasn’t the local officials’ fault that the president didn’t take this seriously.  It wasn’t Mayor Nagin’s fault that soldiers turned back people from the Convention Center at gunpoint when they tried to cross the bridge to the dry, affluent white neighborhood where there was possible food and water.  And it certainly wasn’t the fault of the people of New Orleans, who were born too poor to escape, too fucking poor to even be visible.

Finally, the ultimate mistake.  This president was elected upon the premise, the PROMISE, that America would be safer under this administration’s watch.  Dick Cheney said, during the debates, that he would keep you safe; the other guy might let you die.  Homeland Security was supposed to mean something, it was supposed to make a difference.  Instead it has become another Orwellian lie, like the Clear Skies Act.  The administration has failed in the one thing they said repeatedly they could do right: save us from danger.  How safe do you feel now?

More quotes from our clueless leaders in the past weeks:

“From the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house - the guy lost his whole house - there’s going to be a fantastic house.  And I look forward to sitting on the porch.”  GWB, connecting with the common man.

“We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” - Rep. Baker of Baton Rouge (R)

“I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.” - GWB

“And so many of the people in the (Astrodome) arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this (she chuckled)—this is working very well for them.” - Barbara Bush

“I AM pleased with the federal government’s response…this is not a time for complaining…I am really shocked at the comments that are coming.” - Trent Lott

“The federal government did not even know about the convention center people until today.” - Michael Brown of FEMA, on THURSDAY.