I wanted to share some thoughts on the Twitter outbreak, and what I see as an annoying, if not disturbing, trend on its use.

As noted, I had disconnected the Twitter output to this journal for a few reasons.  I had seen other people doing it and in my heart I had to concur that tweets are better in the context of a conversation.  This is to say nothing of the vexing jargon of all the @ tweets which might have meant something to someone along the way but read on their own start becoming gibberish.  I mean really, when you read something like “@username auuuugh!” what earthly benefit are we getting from that?  It's like hearing only half a cell phone conversation.  It was just my odd perspective that the journal should be more devoted to the English language (or at least the English language as spoken and spelled by Americans).

Allow me to also say that for those friends still porting their tweets to LJ, there’s nothing wrong with that and this is not criticism.  It’s an individual choice (and I simply skip those portions of the journal).

This is not to say Twitter is bad, in fact I still find it amazing.  When you get down to it, the technical premise is simple.  It’s the creative and innovative ways people are using it that has made it (for now) such a phenomenon. 

What I have been seeing (and if truth be told, I am also guilty) is commercial entities getting people to use Twitter to spread word of their product under the guise of contests.  I understand there was an iPhone giveaway somewhere that required the user to add some sort of hash marked product placement in their tweets to be eligible to win the prize.  And I did it myself!  Breakfast Television Toronto was giving away an HD flip camera, and to enter all you had to do was to tweet #flip4BT.  What could be easier?

Except.. I suddenly became a bot the company.  And anyone reading the tweets would say “What the heck is this?”.  (Safe to say I did not win the camera, which may affect my opinion of commercial tweeting, but I digress.)

What are we doing?  Has anyone stopped to think about this?  That one dear friend trying to win the iPhone has been doing free promotion for the company almost every day this week.  I look and see the contest entry and think “This is starting to be a bit annoying”.

We also need to think how this may affect the effectiveness of TwitScoop.  With enough entries, the product could be propelled to a “trending” status—free promotion that we ourselves are generating.

I don’t have an answer.  We do have to credit the companies who are using this medium for their own commercial benefit.  I can’t say we should have seen this coming, but like it or not it’s here.