March 07, 2009

I’ve hated twitter for the longest fucking time with almost the same burning passion with which I’ve hated Facebook. Any “social service” that only serves up a vapid, vacuous burst of meaningless self-involved conversation should go bankrupt and fall off teh internets like the cancer it is.

Unfortunately, everybody from WLU seems to be on twitter. So tonight I jumped on the bandwagon. And then, in the space of about 10 minutes, my whole perception of the service change dramatically.

You see, when I signed up twitter auto-magical added a contact to my list so I wouldn’t feel like a fucking social outcast. The random contact it choose to add was none other than Internet Dave, the Dave I hanged out with back in the day before he became the technology columnist for the National Post.

After going through his feed, it turns out he’s also the same Dave who briefly became Internet famous as the “National Post Meltdown Guy” after telling April, the PR lady, “april - fuck you. seriously. fuck you.” And then the Daily Show took notice, Dave’s career at the National Post ended, and he fled the country for Abu Dhabi.

Thus, it seems I was wrong about twitter. As a medium, twitter is able to probe the same depths of human misery as the best pieces of literature or music. Except that it does so in a concentrated, hard-hitting form — 140 characters, no more no less. Twitter is so intense, we can’t handle more than 140 characters of unimaginable beauty and terror without losing our minds and our attention span.

What was I saying? I lost interest after the pretty picture…