This Blog Is Full Of Crap

In one corner, Helen Popkin of MSNBC:

And also, Twitter is stupid.

It really is. I mean, c'mon. You don't have to get your bowels in an uproar to know that. Twitter is like an RSS feed to every boring aspect of your friend's lives. And your friends are boring. How could they not be? Hourly updates on your best bud's activities get dull pretty fast even if your best bud is Jack Bauer:

"woke up feeling all angsty...left arm tingly"

"oh noes...shot curtis today :-("

"thinkin i gotta torture this guy. oh well"

"can't remember last time i peed"

Yawn.

Why do we think we're so important that we believe other people want to know about what we're having for lunch, how bored we are at work or the state of inebriation we happen to be at this very moment in time? How did society get to the point that we are constantly improving technology so that this non-news can reach others even faster than a cell phone, a text message, a blog, our Facebook profiles?

Result: Uninformative, angry, and ignorant.

In the other corner, Dwight Silverman:

The best way to describe Twitter: It's like instant messaging to a Web page. You can enter brief messages onto your own Twitter page, or add "TwitterIM" to your IM client's buddy list, or send a text message via cell phone, and the result shows up on your Twitter page. Unlike IMs, which are here and gone (or saved on your hard drive if your client logs them), Twitter messages are archived for all time and discoverable by search engines.

On its surface, Twitter forces you to make an obnoxious presumption: That anyone will care enough about what you're doing to go to this page and look at it regularly. However, your pearls of minutiae can be delivered to others via IM or RSS, saving your hordes of fans the trouble of clicking a link or typing in a triple-dub. Thank heaven for technology, eh?

However, the second and more social aspect of Twitter is what makes it more interesting. You can designate people to be your friends, and vice versa. When you do, their musings also end up on your page. Suddenly, it's not all about you -- it's about us, and that has some intriguing possibilities.

My own dim bulb lit up yesterday when I glanced at my Twitter page and saw an item from Houston podcaster Chris Doelle that Research in Motion's BlackBerry network was suffering an outage. I did a quick item on it as a result, which chron.com wound up using to track the story during the day. Thanks, Chris! You and Twitter served as my tipsheet.

Result: Informative, insightful, balanced.

Winner: Dwight Silverman.

A consumer of news information products and services should seriously question the value of MSNBC's technology content if they're promoting Helen's crap as technology news, and, if MSNBC's philosophy and editorial guidelines extend to their other fields of coverage, MSNBC itself.

If Helen Pokpin told me I was on fire, I'd get a second opinion before going through the hassle of stopping, dropping, and rolling