twitter annoys me.

or

?

Twitter annoys me. Now, obviously, to annoy me I must have an account, which is voluntary, but the practice of posting isn't what irritates me. The attention and credit that the site gets for being the innovative, addictive form of dispersing small bits of info is what annoys me, not because I'm jealous that I didn't come up with it, but because it's not really all that original.

Anyone 25 years of age or younger can likely attest to the immediate addiction to AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) ten or more years ago. For me, it began in 1994 when I got my first computer and discovered the messaging system. By the time I was in high school, AIM was commonly used for beginning, maintaining, and ending relationships; at this point, away messages took on a whole new purpose. I can remember a sad number of times when I put up away message content strictly for the response I knew I'd get. After breaking up with a boyfriend, it wasn't uncommon for my away message to read, "out with Joe!" or "fun with the crew!" -- just to prove the point that I was over it.

I was far from being the leader in this practice, which is the entire point. Facebook groups were created with titles like "obsessive away message checkers" and variations with the same purpose. The practice of leaving small blurbs of information that often amount to completely loaded comments is not new. The shift in focus from being primarily a form of real time communication and secondarily a status message to primarily a status message and secondarily a form of [not real time] communication is significant, but in the end the purpose is nearly identical.

Maybe pissing off exes isn't the best example of the similarities. In Seth Godin's recent book, Tribes, he talks about a man who, sick of waiting in line for a Google party, walked to a nearby bar instead of waiting. Upon arrival, the man posted a Twitter update giving the short, sweet details of the bar and his seats in the back, whereupon 8 friends joined him immediately. Original? Maybe to Seth and to the man waiting at the bar, but not to college kids all over the country. Many of our parties began as an away message -- in particular, the second snow day in the history of The Ohio State University during the 2006-2007 winter led my roommates and I to gather our favorite bottles of wine and throw a snow day party at the house. Some text messages were sent out and our away messages on AIM stated something like, "snow day = party at the house...text if you'd like to join!" I believe we went through something like 20 bottles of wine that night due strictly to the reaction to our messages. And sure, some of those were a result of the texting, but an SMS-enabled Twitter account serves much the same purpose as a personal text -- an update by someone you follow translates into a text message; same idea, different outlet.

And most annoying of all is that Twitter is largely successful among the upper 20s and 30s crowd; the same crowd that was a couple of years before the height of the AIM popularity and that incessantly criticized the practice of constantly checking away messages and the concept of AIM in general.

Welcome to the addiction. And Twitter still annoys me.