Twitter Two Cents

Over the past couple of weeks I've noticed an increasing number of people on Twitter saying that Twitter has gotten lame, gone mainstream, or that it has "jumped the shark". There was a dramatic rise in these type of posts last week with Ashton Kutcher/CNN's race to 1 million followers, and also with Oprah beginning to actively use the service. Honestly, I have been a little confused by all these tweets. To me, the beauty of Twitter is that you don't have to read things written by or about people you have no interest in. As of now you have complete control over what shows up in your feed. If you don't care what the Big O had for breakfast, don't follow her. If reading about what Kelso did over the weekend bores you, don't follow him. That's the beauty of the service. Each user can essentially customize it to be whatever they want it to be. If you are one of these people that want to know every detail of celebrities' lives, you can find out probably as much as you want. If you just want to talk to people you know in real life, you can do that too. You can see as much or as little as you want. If you are seeing too much info about stuff you don't care about, it doesn't mean that Twitter has suddenly become lame, it probably means you suck at choosing who to follow. That is not Twitter's fault.

So, following this logic, if I see people in my feed talking about Twitter being too mainstream, be warned you will probably be unfollowed.

In which I talk to the leader of the human resistance

I had an encounter today on Twitter which kind of blew my mind.

It began with the following tweet about Google's April Fool's Day prank "CADIE".

andrewgatlin: Where's John Connor when you need him. » link to CADIE: Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity

A couple of minutes later I received the following response:

johnconnor: @andrewgatlin I'm right here. And cadie poses no threat.

What was mind-blowing about this is that before my original tweet, I wasn't following him, and he wasn't following me. From my perspective this response came out of nowhere. It kind of freaked me out for a second. Then I just decided to go with it. Here is the rest of the exchange.

andrewgatlin: @johnconnor Can you explain this to me? » link to io9 - A Whiteboard That Explains Terminators Entire History - terminator

johnconnor: @andrewgatlin looks right to me but there are more details and convolution that aren't detailed.

johnconnor: @andrewgatlin and you have to remember, anytime someone goes back they went back because they had to otherwise the timeline would change

johnconnor: @andrewgatlin and events that need to happen wouldn't

andrewgatlin: @johnconnor You're not really clearing any of this up...

johnconnor: @andrewgatlin what is there to clear up? Time travel occurred, people died, machines are crazy, humans must stop the machines. Simple to me :)