Are We Twittering Our Time Away for Nothing?

Three months ago I signed up with Twitter at the behest of a business colleague. He said this was the wave of the future. Social networking at its best! An enormous time-improvement over Facebook and sites of that sort.

Kicking and screaming and complaining, I did register for an account. I sat back and said, "Now what? Who really needs to hear whatever tiny and meaningless updates I choose to provide into my personal and/or business life?"

Within 24 hours I was surprised to see I had accrued "followers". I had no idea why they chose me, nor did I have any idea, based on their own personal profiles, how they even found me.

Soon my "home page" was atwitter with short and (all too frequent) notes, comments and meaningless updates. A follower in China thought everyone would like to know he was ready for bed. A music freak in New York complained about a porn flick he had rented that didn't have enough "booty" for his taste.

After a week I was convinced my esteemed colleague had a brain tumor, and I happily shared that perception with him when I asked why, after forcing ME to sign up, doesn't he even send out tweets himself?

"Oh", he explained. "They told me all the big companies are using Twitter now so I thought it would be a good thing to do. I haven't figure out how to use it yet though. I can't even read the junk I get."

Wow. So, this is what Harvard is graduating from its MBA program now?

I wholeheartedly agreed that the messages were indeed difficult to decipher, and those that were written in sentences rather than blurbs usually included things like shortened URLs pointing me to various internet marketing hype had information of no value or interest to me.

As part of my quest to really figure out why anyone would get this involved with a system that only allows you to type 140 characters at a time, I joined a marketing program that was sent to me in one of those odd cryptic messages from one of my followers.

The program is based on the philosophy that if you can get thousands of followers, and send them all a link to this person's program, we can all make money.

I know all about affiliate marketing and, frankly, it's hype. No one gets rich selling these internet marketing programs. BUT I paid my money to see what it was all about.

After doing everything it said, and spending the better part of two days getting all the background basework in place, I did find I had 38 more followers than the day before. However, with these 38 followers (which I dutifully "followed" in return), my Twitter page had messages coming so fast I couldn't keep up. I was panicking about what would happen if I DID end up with thousands of followers! Am I supposed to spend my life reading Tweets?

Is this really to anyone's benefit? Not mine! Out of 192 messages within a 24 hour period, ONE message was of interest to me. The rest were mostly links that were automatically generated by Google Alerts! And this process is even suggested in the marketing program I bought into!

Why on earth would anyone set up a Tweeter account and NOT at least produce the personal little blurbs this was meant for? Someone please tell me what the logic is to have an automated system sending out random blurbs that make no sense to most of the readers?

The purpose of Twitter was to keep people updated on your activities. Hopefully, the updates are at least funny or interesting or add value to someone's day.

But if people are signing up, never sending a personal message, and allowing an outside news delivery service to take over, where is the logic?

People - you are twittering your lives away! Even if you aren't sending automated messages, you're logging in reading someone else's. Don't you have a business to build?