Emotions

No! Not those awful designed "emoticons" that were "popular" but seem to have become less so, at least on the services I choose to use.

Services like Twitter, where 140 chars or less is supposed to support a "conversation" seems to support something else - and its name is the clue. It is supposed to be a place where a meme can spread due to its inherent usefulness. It is promoted as "a place for conversation" but that is a bit like saying the training wheels on a kids bike are useful for transportation.

Treating Twitter like it is a conversation opens up its doors to its world of water cooler comments and useful links that you can respond to with your own links.

It is also a far better way to get curious eyeball traffic to websites. So all the mad marketeers love it, and get quietly unfollowed by most of the saavy accounts. I keep a few pet marketeers just to remind me not to fall into the squawking insistent enthusiasm that seems to be their art.

The limiting of the line to just text, just 140 chars constrains language to such an extend as to reduce meaningfulness. Conveyance of emotion by reaction is confined to ReTweets - repeating or supporting a view. It is designed as a cool medium, so that a real meme can only take off due to its inherency. Trending topics is an attempt to identify memes but it actually is a guide to being rather dull. Twitter is not a popularity context, more a voyage of tepid discovery and wonderful surprises like discovering Read Write Web.

See also:
Read Write Web