12 Witnesses

Ok, if you’ve not heard of twitter, you need to, because it seems to be the new fad in online communication. Apparently it is streamlined blogging with one sentence updates of what you are doing throughout the day.

Now, before I rant, I usually like to clarify what I’m about to say by telling you what I am not saying, so that people don’t misunderstand. I am not about to say that twitter is evil or that people are foolish for using it. I am not about to say that it is not the future of blogging because it may very well be just that. I am not saying that my friends who twitter are no longer my friends or that they are inferior in anyway.

Having said all of that, let me tell you that if you are my friend and you twitter, I AM TALKING TO YOU!

Stop putting your twitter updates in your blog or rss feed to which I subscribe. If you want to tell the world that you are constipated or that you are having a bad hair day…week…life then fine. Frankly, I am skeptical that people want to know this about you, but… Who knows? There might be stalkers out there who have targeted you and you may very well enjoy helping them to plan their assault on you.

That is irrelevant to me. I care not one whit. I will gladly attend your funeral and will mourn appropriately and will be outraged at your untimely and gruesome death at the exactly appropriate level. I may even offer to adopt your children as a way to minister to your family.

I might just do ANYTHING in an attempt to dissuade you from telling me the minutiae of your existence in a constant flow of information.

I am interested in your thoughts on deeper things, so I put your blog in my feedreader, but to my surprise, I began to find the rudimentary goings on in the lives of people I once thought fascinating and it came in buckets of crushing and yet uninteresting information.

Let me simply say that I love you, but not that much.

My wife doesn’t even want to know that much of my life, and I am pretty confident that I don’t need to know that she put on lipstick at 9:14 am before a meeting. And we love each other a lot.

Now that I’ve said that, let me encourage you to twitter all you want, but if you don’t take those blasted updates out of your rss feed, I’ll take your rss feed out of my feedreader. I will still love you. In fact, maybe I’ll love you more from a distance. But I’ll know much less of what you think about real things and I will actually be the lesser for it.

So for the betterment of me, please, if you love me back, stop rss-ing your twitter. Or at least do it separately so that those who do like to stalk you can do it without my knowing as much as they do.

Have a good day.