Thread: The Twitter freak show

PC Pro’s online overlord Barry Collins is, as we speak, trying to be on holiday. This is something he’s not very good at, as evidenced by the fact that 12 minutes after the official start of him not being here, he emailed me about being here. The worst part of this is that he’s actually getting better.

However, in an attempt to prove that he really was going on holiday and wouldn’t be doing any of the things he’s so obviously doing, Barry handed over the keys to PC Pro’s beloved Twitter account, which he nourishes with the sort of obsessive care that even Gollum would consider a little excessive.

Before he “left” Barry instructed me to install Tweetdeck - which is essentially a window wiper allowing you to make sense of Twitter’s endless word rain. He couldn’t have done me any more damage if he’d stirred heroin into my tea. Once installed, Tweetdeck demands all of your attention and I’ve actually developed a tweet twitch from constantly flicking my glance to my second monitor looking for updates. What’s worse is that most of what flashes on my screen I don’t care about, and would live happily without ever having read.



The problem is that Tweetdeck indulges my inner nosiness. It’s basically the internet equivalent of listening to other people’s conversation on the bus. Sure I’ve a few friends talking to me, but the majority of my time is spent listening to other people’s thought diarrhoea.

Actually, my first days with Tweetdeck utterly confounded me. It was too much information to accommodate in a brain that’s typically happy with “want food, see food, eat food” but as I’ve adapted and learned to filter by relevance it’s become increasingly clear to me that one social network in my life is one social network too many. I’m too easily distracted and Twitter is a freak show. For every sensible and entertaining post and link, there’s somebody explaining what they’d like to do to PC Pro’s collective bottom.