On Christmas morning, the cat was fascinated. For maybe five minutes. Then, all it was concerned with was empty boxes and crumpled paper. It had the time of its life with those.
Kids are like that too. You get them the thing they’ve been pleading for and, after a short period, they lose interest and go on to something else.
Both Facebook and Twitter have captured the imaginations of truckloads of people. It seems everyone is on one or both. And with good reason. Both are useful, relatively easy to use and, perhaps most important, keep people connected.
I don’t think there is any question about their usefulness. However, at least with Facebook and Twitter, the usefulness is weighed, or will be sooner or later, in the scales that have the useful factor on one side and the annoyance factor on the other. No matter how useful they are, I think the annoyance aspect will win out. Another tool will come along, one less filled with constant smiles, tweets and memes.
In themselves, none of these things is annoying. They’re kind of nice, sometimes. But the operative word here is sometimes. Sheer quantity is a cancer that, I suspect, will kill both. Someone, somewhere will design a tool that manages to maintain the useful factor and minimize the annoyance. And that will trump all the other tools and sites and so on.
The real problem with both Facebook and Twitter and any other social networking tool is the inability to sense mood. Sometimes we’re open and eager to be tagged with “25 things about me” or get a tweet like, “Why can’t they make pants that fit me?” But just as often, maybe even more often, it seems a waste of our time, a trivial bit of nonsense we don’t have time for. That’s a mood thing. A state of mind thing. And the tool, the app, whatever you want to call it, can’t read that.
Very quickly, the bloom is off the rose.
My answer would be for both Facebook and Twitter to have something like a, “Don’t annoy me” setting, a button or something that limits what comes through. Of course, the question is how does it know what is to be blocked and what to let through?
I dunno. I find both useful. I like them despite initial reservations. But as with what appears to be an increasing number of other people, I also find them irritating and wish they would shut up and go away. Yet I don’t want to lose what they offer. I don’t know what the answer is.
My guess, however, is that if they don’t address this annoyance aspect and ramp up the useful aspects, the shelf life of both may not be a lengthy.
Of course, on the Internet, very few things have a long shelf like. The ones that do, though, are useful and are only minimally annoying, if at all.
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