Rhymes with Cars

Maybe I'm just getting old. I constantly hear myself saying the following with increasing frequency:

People drive too damn fast

That music is too loud

That music sucks

Don't dress that way

We didn't do it that way

Aaargh, ugh, sigh, mmmph, or any other expression to verbally express my utter frustration with the public.

WTF

At less than half his age, I sound like an older version of my grandfather. Maybe that is why I don't get Twitter, the online sensation that is getting tons of hype thanks to an outstanding presence at SXSW. When I was selling Enterprise Messenger at Yahoo, one of our semi-senior executives who shall go nameless, was big on presence in IM. Like a lot of people in the early days of Messenger, he felt that presence, not IM'ing was the killer app. So he used it. Boy did he use it. He used it to the point of embarrassment and water cooler ridicule. It wasn't the usual presence indication like "WFH - Call Cell", "Not at my desk" or even the juvenile "POS". What this person posted were real-time presence indicators like "Eating almonds", "Answering Emails" and the still odd, but regularly laughed at "Watching Britney Spears in My Boxer Shorts". Seriously. A senior executive had that as his presence indicator one night, but that is a whole different post and, I suspect, one of the reasons that he is no longer at Yahoo. Anyway, when I look at Twitter, all I see is a real time presence indicator that no one cares about. MIT Advertising Lab summed it up nicely today:

I still can't understand why everyone's so excited about Twitter, which looks like a pinnacle of narcissism and is more boring to read then The Dullest Blog in the World,...

Don't get me wrong, I think that Jason Calacanis, Michael Arrington, & Ross Mayfield are great bloggers and I love hearing their point of view on the wide array of topics that they bring up. But candidly, I could care less what they are doing 24/7. No one is that interesting. And that is my problem with Twitter. Maybe I'm just getting old. But perhaps, people just aren't as interesting as they think that they are.