Fuck Twitter and fuck you for using it.

It’s not a phenomenon. It’s not the dog’s bollocks. It’s fucking annoying and exceeds at such in two specific ways.

1. It’s made by douchebags.
2. It’s made for douchebags.

The aborted tomato-juice-red mess on the linoleum floor of this Web 2.0 revolution has been rightly assessed in other venues, but it seems my social circle decided to sign up for the tweetastic voyage six months after everyone else figured out how rock fucking stupid it is. The tweeting isn’t merely one of the harmless miscarriages of technology that must happen every five years or so, like tamagotchis or side curtain airbags or slap bracelets. It is an offense to all things right and good; a worldwide platform for the chronically clingy to project their pathology to the planet without any mechanical filter. It’s a bad thing created by evil men for horrible people to force their ridiculous drama on we, the pure and righteous.

The prosecution needed all damn day just to tag all the evidence against these war criminals.

Exhibit A: It doesn’t fucking work.

The Twitter service goes down faster than a meth addict a nickel short from a dime bag, longer than an Olsen twin in need of an primetime TV cameo, and with more enthusiasm than Tila Tequila at really any moment. The site can’t stay up, the service can’t stay up, and anything depending on their API for data input better have the error handling routine for “connection to server was reset” on speed dial.

Built on Ruby on Rails, Twitter was meant to be the shining example of how that application stack could defy the conventional wisdom of web professionals everywhere and prove that particular technology can scale. With a little less than 98% uptime for 2007 and a 2008 forecast diving head first into the portashitter, this poster child of Ruby on Rails scalability is only proving to the world what we already knew. Six full days of downtime a year is not Web 2.0. It’s not even Web 1.0. It’s Web how-about-you-fix-your-goddamned-website-already.

The ironic beauty is that the tool is as wrong as the task. This is some cosmic shit right here – they made something totally fucked with something that is totally fucked. Not only did they build the house on sand, they made it with waxed mittens.

Exhibit B: No one fucking cares.

To tweet is to presume that one’s life is important enough to be delivered in high definition. That the resolution that everyone on the planet needs in order to feel like they are properly digesting the summer blockbuster that is one’s life has to be measured in pixels per square millimeter. First with emails then with instant messaging then with blogs and then with social networks… It was a slippery slope that made this American life less a journey and more a soap opera – a neverending series of cliffhangers interlaced with the same from others in a batshit desperate attempt to keep the ones we love from switching to another, more interesting channel.

The result is a broadband connection to an arrogant jackhole’s poopchute. I know you’re out “clubbin’ with the girls,” sweetheart. You know how I know? Because you told me that afternoon. Thinking that anyone would need reinforcement with this kind of inane detail is capital douchebaggery. I need an up-to-the-minute update on precisely two people on this planet, one of which is satisfied by WEEI and the other governed by a rather unfortunate restraining order.

Johnny Depp is a nice guy. The judges of Los Angeles county, on the other hand, need to learn to take a fucking joke.

Exhibit C: There is no fucking filter.

The “mashup” community went wild when a guy figured out the ultimate in online inanity, posting a video about how he could turn off his bedroom lights by tweeting from his BlackBerry. Dude pops open a text message, messages “Bedroom lights off” to Twitter, and before you can shit on your shinola the bedroom lights – for which the switch is right fucking in front of him – turn off automagickally.

There’s a serious problem here. Everyone who is stuck listening to his tweeting gets to hear he just turned his bedroom lights off. It’s living done in multicast, where the implication of who is going to hear something is less important than being able to say it through a bullhorn. There are already a number of solutions out there for controlling house lights with a phone.

Deliberately electing a technical solution that involves telling every last fucker you know that your lights are turning off isn’t innovative. It’s being an egocentric dick.

The good news is that this is all going to implode under the weight of its shoddy technical construction well before we have to deal with the real general public getting the ability to do this. So long as it is in the hands of the somewhat technical, we will continue to live normal lives with the lyme disease that is Twitter.

What is frightening is not if they get bought by Google. It is if they get bought by McDonald’s.

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