After 918 days of being a Twitter user, 114 days with my second account, 9605 tweets11, now I have left Twitter.
The reason is quite simple: it took me too much and I couldnt really make something useful out of 140s.
About two weeks ago2, I started to use FriendFeed to post my updates. I got much less responses on FriendFeed than on Twitter, but I still think FriendFeed is a better place for me. I dont want to be limited by 140 rules with only plain text. I want to have a close pattern to real discussion, not just the reply mess or the RT mess.
The last week, I have been more productive, I almost posted one posting a day, coded everyday, buried in bugs. I read more and thought more and deeper. Time was still not enough but I was using time, not wasting time. I pressed F5 less and stayed in Vim (text editor) more. I used to do system update less than every 24 hours because I was too bored for waiting tweets show up, now I rarely noticed that I didnt update yet.
Please dont get me wrong, its not as if Twitter is a bad or poor service. Its just what Twitter is is not for me anymore and I am not a person have good self-control power, my willpower is pretty weak. Its easy to be distracted and too many tweets to read them all. I only had followed 20 users, I felt that already. I think following peoples organized thoughts might be better, such as blogs.
However, I am not totally leaving actually, because I still have some unfinished business on Twitter, but I dont read tweets anymore, at least not those without me being mentioned.
| [1] | (1, 2) 4399 tweets from livibetter plus 5206 tweets from lyjl at the moment I tweeted I am leaving. |
| [2] | http://friendfeed.com/livibetter/b0bf1915/friendfeed-is-better-than-twitter-in-many-ways is gone. |