It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void like some chatterbox Onan. How humiliating. How demoralizing.

This article is exactly how I feel about social networks. Everyone gets to broadcast whatever they feel like broadcasting to everyone that follows them. Finally, broadcasting huge email letters about myself is socially wrong, and even mass-mailing jokes went out in the 90’s. But with Twitter and Facebook, there is no social stigma against this. It’s actually ALL about that.

It’s really interesting how the author realizes how trivial it is. Realizes how no one was reading or following his tweets close enough to even expect them. Not even the author himself. Is there a possibility that social networking is a fad? Something that will surely exist for the younger navel-gazing aged children. Something you grow out of? For now everyone is using social networks. But could there be a blow back? 

I hate finding people that I’m interested in (authors, thinkers, celebs) on Twitter and thinking I might like to see some small observation of theirs every now and then; and then to have them hyperactively tweeting, retweeting others and responding to other peoples tweets. It’s like you’re a detective that has to eek out exactly what that public conversation they having is about. Why are they having a public, broadcast conversation at all?