What Twitter (and Buzz) isn’t for — I understand no one cares about your boring life

Rant time. None of my friends regularly use Twitter (voluntarily), and it is always the same argument. “Why does anyone care if I’m eating a sandwich?” Correct, no one cares if you’re eating a sandwich, so don’t post that.

I started using Twitter to follow people and organizations that post interesting stuff. Before Twitter, I never could get in the habit of reading the news using RSS feeds or something other means. My Google Reader is just a mess, 90% of the posts I don’t want to read. This required a lot of effort to sort through and find what I did want to read, so I naturally stopped doing so. Now with Twitter, if it isn’t important news, an interesting blog post or some other tidbit of important/entertaining information, I simply ignore it as I scroll through my stream. A lot of what shows up on my stream is something I would be interested in because the people/organizations I follow don’t post everything and anything. Combine that with the act of “retweeting” and a lot of crap is “filtered out” automatically. Also, looking at trending topics helps to filter out the non-important stuff even further.

Now with Google Buzz, it is even more convenient because I am always in GMail, so I simply click over to my Buzz inbox and take a quick peak. (However, Buzz still needs to gain some traction.)

Back to my main point, if you have a mind-numbingly boring life, there is still value in Twitter/Buzz. If you have nothing interesting or entertaining to share, don’t post anything. You still end up coming across some interesting/entertaining stuff (if you follow the right people… like me… because I’m awesome).

I created this chart to give incompetent (would-be) Twitter users some help (if you have other examples, let me know and I will post them):

Originally published at www.fakeweblog.com on February 11, 2010.