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Internet Annoyances
Internet Crime - Bad Design & Programming - Commercial Outgrowths - Web 2.0 Outgrowths
Considering that I am almost constantly online since since 1996, I am overall very pleased with the development of the internet to a universal platform to acquire information, to work on common projects, to exchange opinions, to do some shopping and banking and to have fun. Some trends, however, have become increasingly annoying, for me as a webmaster of a big site as well as a "normal" user.
Disclaimer While I'm doing my best to stick to the facts in this commentary, please note that some of my observations may be flawed or outdated and that my findings may be very personal. I haven't included many links to back my views, because I don't feel like updating them all the time.
Spam Sure. Who doesn't hate it? But most of all I am astonished that the overall spam volume is still rising after so many years, although there is close to no return from it. Currently the vast majority of all e-mail messages has to be considered spam. If it hasn't already been filtered out automatically, every human being who is not a complete moron can recognize spam in milliseconds. This used to be different a couple of years ago when I actually read some of the then infrequent spam mails, especially the amusing ones pretending to come from former African dictators.
I reckon that when some dick sends out 1 million spam messages today, only some 100,000 will get noticed at all for a split second. Out of these 100,000 human spam recipients, maybe 100 will read more than a few words. Of these 100, only 10 will click a link to penis enlargement because, if there is any information provided, it is quickly recognizable as fraudulent or at least untrustworthy (for instance, because of bad spelling). Statistically, I believe that at most 1 of these 10 people will buy anything. And this is only possible under the assumption that the site is working and sells anything at all and is not just another dead link or a redirect to something totally different - many spam-advertised sites appear to be dead ends!
So even if it is possible to earn a few cents per 1 million spam messages simply because someone pays for the page clicks, there can never be sufficient return to justify the (admittedly small) effort of sending out all these mails. Common sense tells me that whole system should be increasingly unlikely to work, even if it were legal. And if sending a single e-mail cost only 0.1 cent, the spam business should have collapsed long ago. So why is it still thriving? Unless the spammers themselves are complete idiots (which is what most spam messages look like), spam must be a miraculous way to find the needle in the haystack, the one out of one million who is still gullible enough.
On a side note, regarding the customary "I need your bank account to transfer my money" fraud (the Nigeria scam), I read about an investigation that came to the startling result that intellectual people are much more likely to fall for it than users with average education!
Phishing Of all fraudulent internet manipulations phishing is the probably most insidious one. Because you can never be careful enough. I sometimes spend a few minutes until I can rule out the authenticity of a message from a bank, from PayPal or from eBay. The spoofed messages very often look quite genuine.
Here is what I do when I suspect that I have received a phishing mail (in about this order):
Website miniaturization The screen resolutions and monitor dimensions are always growing. The last time I worked on a 640*480 pixel monitor was in 1996. But many websites, and particularly those of big companies, have a fixed width of 800 or even 640 pixels, and are using the smallest possible font size that is barely readable. Moreover, on many news sites that squeeze the text into a narrow column between the navigation bar and the ads, I get only a small portion of an article at a time and I have to press "next" several times to carry on reading. While I can increase the font size for better accessibility (which inevitably ruins the layout especially if the text columns are narrow), there is no real way how I can tell the website to occupy a larger portion of my big screen (which is big for a reason after all). Some sites should really list a magnification glass among their viewing requirements.
I think that, rather than paying attention to antiquated monitors, the web designers simply don't know better but to nail down absolute dimensions for everything, especially since everything can be formatted so easily with CSS. I am fond of CSS as a great way to customize everything, but it encourages web designers to abandon the art of adaptive layouts.
JavaScript links and mutilated windows Why is it necessary to have images or even sub-pages open in new browser windows (with or without a redundant "close this window" button, and too often without a menu bar and location bar)? I've talked to a few site designers, and I was told more than once that the average user would likely always stay in the same window and always click on links, never on the "back" button. What a crap! Because if the users were really that dull, there would be nothing more confusing to them than a maze of windows, especially if it's not clear how they are being controlled (like when you click on another image link on the page of origin, and you don't know whether the image opens another pop-up or refreshes the current one).
With the advent of Firefox that offers to open links in a new tab and to organize, lock and even restore tabs I was hoping that the bad programming habits of some web designers to open overlapping non-maximized windows would be overridden. But especially the irritating pop-ups have found ways to defy Firefox. JavaScript pseudo-links are still commonly used, although it should be commonly known by now that search engines don't recognize them correctly.
Captchas I hate them. It took captchas just one or two years to become one of the worst online plagues. I want to comment on a blog or write into a guestbook, I want to log in somewhere or download something. I'm in a good temper, but suddenly a page comes up with a cryptical image of disfigured numbers and letters. I look at it for a few seconds and try to figure out what it shows. But as careful as I am, I fail to pass captchas half of the time. Am I just too stupid? No, that honor belongs to the people who conceived the captchas. Captchas rarely work the way they should for one or more of the following reasons:
As a website owner I know too well how nasty spambots can be. But "enhancing" the captchas by making them always more enigmatic riddles doesn't help. It only annoys the hell out of the human visitors. The much better option is to ask a simple question that a human being can easily answer. Since I switched to such a procedure, asking a simple question that every casual Trek fan can easily answer, there have never been any spam entries in my guestbook.
Streaming I understand the desire to avert unwarranted distribution of copyrighted media, or at least to make any duplication as hard as possible. But streaming videos instead of permitting downloads has become a major internet annoyance for me (and it still doesn't prevent computer buffs from ripping streams). Most importantly, streams are a huge and continually increasing waste of bandwidth. This may be ultimately at the expense of HTML, e-mail or download traffic, all of which I rate as much more valuable than a transitory video that normally can't even be saved.
Streaming effectively excludes everyone with not quite as fast a connection from accessing online media in the first place. It almost seems like video portals are cooperating with providers of DSL or expensive mobile internet (although UMTS is still not sufficient in my experience), in order to allow them to sell always broader bandwidths. But even with fast internet, streaming never worked well enough for me, and perhaps never will. Even if it happens "only" once every two minutes, it annoys the hell out of me when the stream and briefly later the playback hangs, making it inferior to analog broadcasts that have been working smoothly for almost a century. But the providers of online media, among them TV stations whose conventional broadcasts are doing fine, apparently expect me to put up with such a disrupted "viewing experience" when watching a whole movie or episode as a stream. No thanks. And when I try to load a video stream in the background while doing something useful in the meantime, it happens quite often that the video is gone when I return and I have to load everything again (speaking of wasted bandwidth).
Well, after I had given up on listening to web radio almost ten years ago although I already had Mbit/s internet access at the university, I recently tried it again with DSL after a long time. It worked half-way satisfactory. But I have no hope for the streams of video portals or TV stations to meet my expectations of adequate online videos any time soon - which would be a quality and reliability at least on par with old-fashioned analog TV.
Flash Player I concede that streaming may be an acceptable way to show small (and accordingly fast loading) clips embedded in websites, if only there were a reliable software to play them. But most streams force me to have Flash Player installed. I don't know if I'm the only one, but messages like these keep haunting me for over ten years: "Get Flash Player now" (when I have Flash Player but it was not installed for all browsers for some reason), "Please upgrade to the latest version" (when I already have the latest version) or "You need Flash Player 9 to play this video" (when I have version 10 installed).
The whole concept of Flash is flawed from the start, because it is overblown at the expense of usability. Well, Windows Media Player is overblown too, but at least there are lightweight alternatives that don't exist for the Flash Player plug-in. As already mentioned, if there were a lean video player to play streams (like with conventional TV that fundamentally needs no player software at all), the idea of online broadcasts wouldn't be all that bad. But Flash is much more than a simple player, and it does much more than becomes apparent to a normal user, such as circumventing the security and privacy settings of my browser or its plug-ins. Still, it doesn't offer any useful configuration options. And the use of Flash on websites is not restricted to playing videos or presenting truly interactive content (for which it can be beneficial in spite of everything). Many web designers just can't resist creating complete navigation structures with Flash, or they pack text into Flash images, which makes it totally inaccessible. And don't get me started on the dreadful Flash ads! Speaking of reduced usability, it is extremely frustrating how Flash disables the right-button menu and CTRL-LMB to open a new tab, throwing me back into the browser stone age (and forcing me to reload the same browser window all over again when going forth and back, speaking of wasted bandwidth).
But worst of all, nasty Flash applications frequently usurp 100% of my CPU power and make my PC or laptop hang, so the only remedy is to end Firefox by force. This may not be Adobe's fault in the first place, but of all applications that run on my computers, either stand-alone or as browser plug-ins, it is almost always Flash that makes the system freeze, so there must be something genuinely wrong about it.
Overcrowded and ad-polluted portal websites The portals of fully or partially online-based companies such as e-mail providers, other internet services, media companies or TV stations are being visited by millions of people every day. While this should be an incentive for them to come up with a particularly decent looking, fast-loading and easy-to-use web design, their portals are very often exactly the contrary. There is usually no consistent site design, and sometimes no visible concept at all. Half of a page's real estate is often reserved for off-site ads. Many websites even give away their page background to ads, which then appears in colors such as pink or yellow! Much of the rest is spent for unrequested videos and Flash animations that waste valuable bandwidth and CPU power. The overall volume of a single page, including all media, is often far beyond 1 megabyte, making a visit without DSL impossible. While pop-ups are fortunately not so common any longer and can be suppressed most of the time, busy Flash ads or ad windows hovering above and/or moving across the page have become commonplace, and it is a pain of the ass to click them away - and to do so without accidentally clicking a link on the page below. There are no real menus, and important functions such as search, login, help, FAQ or contact are obscured in a way as if they don't want to be found. Sometimes direct navigation to content pages is not possible, but only via an intermediate page (with more ads, of course). Most portals look like porn sites these days, only without the tits.
The rationale for the degradation of websites of online companies is evident, however. The sites were initially set up as a service to their customers, many of them as soon as in the mid-1990s. But now that the internet has become a mass market it is just too tempting to squeeze more profit out of a site by filling it with ads and by offering paid "premium" services that very often have nothing to do with the original purpose of the website or even with the scope of the company itself. When I go to the site of a TV station, I would expect to find extensive information about their programs, such as transcripts, annotations, background information, production information or additional links. But it is a huge disappointment every time I look for such content. I am apparently asking too much, and I am rather expected to play browser games or download ring tones from a TV website. And pertaining to the ads, it is peculiar how the companies (at least if they are not direct competitors) mutually pollute their websites!
The pleasant exception among the web-based companies shouldn't remain unmentioned: Google - a commercial site that does not only have a very simple and fast interface but also decent ways to integrate ads into the search results (well, Google's all-dominating AdSense service for other sites is another story). The same praise goes to eBay, although to lesser degree because it is not quite as clean any more.
Fake sites and rip-offs I frankly concede that the performance of Google (and of other search engines likewise) has improved a lot in the past few years despite the ever rising data volume to be handled by their servers. It has always become harder to cheat and to get fraudulent content listed. However, there are still too many fake sites that slip the net and that receive average to good ranking from Google. The typical fake is an automatically generated page with a short and distinct static URL (insinuating rich content) and a common Google search term as its title. But looking closer, the "content" consists of nothing but a list of old search results and some ads that may or may not be remotely related to the page title. Something like this is utterly useless and frustrating each time a user is looking for real information. I even stumbled across pages where I could "Learn everything about Ex-Astris-Scientia.org" or even "Find the Lowest Prices for Ex-Astris-Scientia.org", as if my site were for sale!
Google usually deletes auto-generated pages from the index when they are discovered or reported. Many of them are parts of a link farm that has been set up to rank another page higher and are therefore banned from Google. I appreciate that. On the other hand, Google even offers to build such sites with their AdSense for Domains program! In other words, Google helps to cheat unsuspecting visitors, helps to undermine its own index. It is a pathetic pretext that "parked domains" will eventually be filled with content. If a parked domain is really meant to serve a certain company, the least they must do is announce the upcoming launch of the website instead of filling it with pointless ads that will deter visitors forever. For the same reason, a half-way respectable company would never register a domain that has been contaminated with an ad portal in its recent history and may even be much more expensive than a fresh one. Ad-polluted parked domains (many of which have been taken away from defaulting webmasters and its reputation ruined to embarrass them) are dead domains, and still Google actively supports them.
Another annoyance are ripped sites, especially those duplicating Wikipedia. While it may be a good idea to have more than one universal encyclopedia just to read a second opinion or to see a different approach, there are many wiki-based encyclopedias that exactly copy a portion of Wikipedia and are never updated. I can understand well if something like news is exchanged among different sites, but encyclopedic content should be off limits. I am not sure about the legal ramifications (Wikipedia may allow to copy their articles). In any case it is a total waste.
Babylonian sites For ten years I have been accustomed to speaking English whenever I am online, unless I am moving through a purely German realm like with eBay, other online shopping, my bank account etc. However, recently all sorts of sites force me to speak German even when I don't want to. They are "intelligent" and analyze my IP, offering me a customized German version. Likewise, at work I frequently have to switch to French, because our company's network hub is located in France.
Google is among the sites that insist on me speaking German or French - when I type "www.google.com" I wind up at "www.google.de", or "www.google.fr", respectively. This wouldn't bother me very much, if the search results were not customized as well, with German/French language results always coming first. But not only the ordering of the results is different. Google has separate databases on their different language-specific sub-sites. I may not even find some English-speaking results with the German or French Google. The only way to switch to the English default version is to click a small link at the bottom of the page, which then takes me to and keeps me at "google.com". Well, I can stay logged in, so Google will respect my language preference, but I don't really want them to know everything that I search for. The best way is to access Google through the built-in Firefox search engine, which always takes me to google.com.
It's similar with several blogging communities. When I go to what I think is the English version, I am greeted with "Willkommen" nonetheless. I appreciate that as long as the German version is correct. But when I visit a blog of some American guy, and it shows the content in English, but the standard links, navigation and even his bio in German, it becomes bizarre. Especially since "Education: High School" is routinely translated to "Schulbildung: Gymnasium". But a German Gymnasium is only remotely comparable to a US high school (the better analogy would be "Gesamtschule"), and it must not be confused with a gym!
I am only glad that they don't attempt to automatically translate essential content with Google Translate to create total confusion... But this will be only a matter of time.
On a funny note, eBay auto-translates some of the item description from foreign eBay sites as a "translation service without warranty". This includes translations of ebay.at items, from Austrian to German as it seems!
Modern paternalism In a similar fashion as automatically switching to the language that I am believed to speak, several websites claim to be more intelligent than I am. They anticipate what I am allegedly looking for. The first example has not yet become a commonly accepted technique, and I hope it will never happen. On some websites hosting blogs or articles it happens that words inside a paragraph are being underlined. But what appears to be a wiki-like keyword-sensitive linking to a definition or further information turns out to be a particularly insidious way to incorporate ads. Phew! Sites or hosts doing something disgusting like this should be boycotted.
A perhaps even worse example of websites that know better what I want than I do myself is the automatic correction of alleged misspellings in search results, including hits for search terms that have nothing to do with what I am looking for. Example: In order to stay informed about where EAS is being cited, I can do a simple web search, combining "ex astris" with various keywords. Google, however, gives me many search results with the term "Astrid" instead of "astris", without telling me that the search was extended. Google obviously assumes that I am looking for a girl named Astrid but I am too stupid to spell her name correctly. I don't know what the criteria are, because "astris" is not even an extremely rare word that might justify being "auto-corrected". Typing other unusual search terms (even things that have to be typos by all means) Google does its job the way I would expect and only suggests "Did you mean...?" when it suspects a misspelling, which is a lot more transparent and less patronizing. There is absolutely no need for auto-correction.
Finally, why is it that many websites refer me to "most popular topics"? This may be helpful on news sites, but it has become a common practice everywhere. At EAS, I'm trying to direct people to the best features in my humble opinion, especially when I think they deserve more attention than they usually receive. But EAS is not really made for people with "average interests" anyway. ;-)
Speaking of "most popular", even eBay has jumped on the bandwagon and now lists the "best matches" on top of the list, meaning the most frequently requested items or items of the top-rated commercial sellers. This is extremely unfair because sellers of less popular items or private sellers are getting even less exposure at eBay than before by being demoted in the search result order. And there are investigations that 80% of all users don't change the default search order. It is also extremely annoying for me as a "more demanding" user because each time, when the results are already being displayed, I have to reload the search with a useful order (such as by date).
Deferred off-site links I don't know if this annoys other people just as much as me, but I absolutely hate it when I click an off-site link, and instead of being taken directly to the destination I get an intermediate page with a friendly message "You are leaving..." and an advertisement. This habit was a temporary nuisance already around the year 2000, but it has resurfaced vehemently in more recent years.
Even some sites with a so far very good reputation such as Memory Alpha resort to showing an ad page after an off-site link has been clicked. This clearly has economic reasons and is imposed on the site by the mother company Wikia, rather than by the fans who maintain MA. Anyway, it can only be labeled as bad style. It slows down the performance perhaps even more than a pop-up banner would do. The companies that buy and sell ads on the internet don't ask whether their practices annoy the hell out of the visitors. They just try putting ads in every place where it is technically possible. But it remains to be seen whether the intermediate page acts as a subconscious barrier and makes people stay at MA, or whether it rather damages the site's reputation.
An almost cynical variant of the intermediate page showed up for some time when someone clicked an off-site from Facebook. It reads: "Be careful. For the safety and privacy of your Facebook account, remember to never enter your password unless you're on the real Facebook web site. Also be sure to only download software from sites you trust." Oh yes. The internet is so dangerous, you better stay in the cozy realm that is Facebook. Give me a break!!! Facebook is infamous for its own lack of data security, and they warn people when they try to leave the place?!
Another aspect to be taken into account is that because of the intermediate pages the mere existence of off-site links is concealed, and that they may become invisible to search engines. It depends on how it is done exactly, but a page whose outbound links are "protected" with intermediate pages may not contribute their due share of Google PageRank to the link target, while the page still gains PageRank from any incoming links. If this is true, the consequence is that pages of MA and Facebook climb up the list at Google at the expense of the linked pages. I can't verify if this is really the case though.
Mindless bookmarking and blog posts I am gradually putting up with the new features of the Web 2.0, many of which are very casual compared to what I see as the profundity of traditional websites. I am old-fashioned and I miss the days when website visitors actually recognized what was new and exciting and when they used to read and reflect on what someone was writing. Case in point: In early 2008 the EAS counter went up because of several blog, social networking and online bookmarking posts. The subject: "Starship Interiors", a page that had already been in existence at EAS for several years at that time. First off, I am glad that people still seem to care about my site, and now is as good a time as any, even if an old page is in the focus. But the latter is also a part of the problem of Web 2.0. Once it has entered the blogosphere, the old news gets reposted effortlessly, and it becomes something "new" (at least for a day until it has been shifted down to the 14th archive page, where it will never be found again).
And while I think that most people who clicked the "Starship Interiors" link did have a closer look at the content, many of those who felt compelled to comment did not mind the actual topic. It seems that they took for granted that that I created those cross-section views of the ship interiors myself, although the actual source is credited beneath every single thumbnail. Also, several people complained "So many images, but none from the Enterprise-D?" They didn't even bother going one page level up to look for the TNG page. It appears they don't know or don't care any longer how a website such as EAS works - a real website with a navigation structure, not one with overall randomly selected half-baked stuff.
Finally, the "miserable geek in his mother's basement" comment seems to be compulsory in any bookmarking or networking thread discussing the Trek fandom. I suspect communites such as Fark.com, Digg and Delicio.us have an extra shortcut for their users to post this very comment easily.
Wikipedia - hive of conceit? I like Wikipedia very much. It is one of the few sites that I visit almost every day, a site where I can spend hours and always discover something new. I consult Wikipedia very often for my research in various fields. I have learned a lot on subjects that I barely knew anything about before Wikipedia. I appreciate very much that people dedicate much of their spare time to extend the site, to keep it accurate and up-to-date. But I find it worrying that at least in one of the fields where I am an expert Wikipedia turns out to be selective and self-important.
It may not be just a problem of the Star Trek fandom, but it sucks that well-written articles about major Trek websites like TrekBBS were deleted from Wikipedia and even Memory Alpha has been tagged for deletion for some time. All because of lacking "notability" under the debatable terms of Wikipedia that might permit the inclusion a local school magazine and perhaps a garage business but not of a fan website with tens of thousands of worldwide users every day. On the other hand, the Star Fleet Universe, a gaming subculture that only few fans care for, was conceded a whole article series (which has been cut down in the meantime though). I'm not even complaining that an article about my own website, Ex Astris Scientia, was first rewritten to one about the Starfleet Academy motto of the same name and eventually added to the one about the Starfleet Academy, with the only sentence left about EAS incorrectly calling it a "fanon website". But the deletion policy should remain consistent, which is not the case as long as a few other unofficial Trek sites still have their place at Wikipedia, not to mention many other fan sites outside Star Trek.
Something that offends me personally is that several links from Wikipedia articles to EAS were deleted although they were perfectly fitting in the context, the best off-site links Wikipedia could possibly get, with much more detailed information on the very topic of the Wikipedia page. The cited reasons in these cases: "A personal website is not notable/reputable", "original research" or even "link spam". In fact, Wikipedia withholds important information and denies its users the opportunity to obtain a second opinion by not linking to EAS, the #1 website for starships, technology and continuity issues. On the other hand, Wikipedia absolutely loves to cite the ramblings about Star Trek by "reputable" online critics or newspaper columnists, although these usually have neither special ties to nor sufficient knowledge of the franchise or the fandom.
Wikipedia certainly gets the basic facts about Star Trek right, but does everything to keep the franchise and even more so the fandom small. Overall it is not a good Trek resource anyway. That honor definitely belongs to Memory Alpha, although especially in the wake of the latest movie it too has developed a bit of a "better than thou" attitude towards "biased" fans. Overall, the way that Wikipedia and, to lesser extent, Memory Alpha deals with the fandom is another aspect of the general trend that the operation of fan websites is increasingly obstructed and their mere existence is ignored. It is obvious that no profit can be made in any form of alliance with sites such as EAS, which makes them irrelevant in today's business-driven internet. But I can't help the impression that this stance rubs off on an increasing number of private internet users and on Wikipedia as a non-commercial platform, who may have come to think that a place that doesn't sell anything and has no ads can be no good. Fan sites like EAS that are not organized in a seemingly "democratic" fashion but are maintained by single individuals are additionally under suspicion of being inappropriately biased and possibly incorrect, as if online collaboration would eliminate personal opinions and flawed concepts a priori.
There is another, albeit minor source of sorrow pertaining Wikipedia. Minor, however, only because EAS is non-commercial. The site has enforced the automatic addition of <rel="nofollow"> to any outbound link, which I suspect is a questionable SEO technique, with the same effect as the other techniques of deferred linking mentioned above. That way Wikipedia does not leak any Google PageRank, while it gains PageRank from any incoming links (such as from EAS) that are usually not protected. The consequence is that Wikipedia pages climb up the list at Google. Many Wikipedia articles have much higher PageRanks than the index pages of whole major websites dedicated to the very same topic. Those Wikipedia pages appear first in Google's search results, although they are just sub-pages. There are many factors that contribute to Google rankings, but Wikipedia's link policy certainly helps to stay on the top. Maybe I should be even glad that there is no article on EAS at Wikipedia any longer.
Twitter litter I am not a big fan of the so-called Web 2.0 because I was quite content with the conventional internet as a platform for companies, institutions and individuals to present their products, services, research or opinions. I certainly appreciate the new possibilities of online shopping and banking, of online collaboration and photo/video sharing. There are even a couple of blogs I like, although it is my firm opinion that hand-made sites are superior. But I never asked for something like social networking, link sharing and microblogging, because it appears to me as a poor surrogate for traditional websites and discussion forums and ultimately as a poor imitation of life itself. I just don't want to boast a list of online "friends" or "followers", even though there is a chance that a few of them may become true friends.
I am willing to give the Web 2.0 a chance though. I am creating RSS feeds with EAS site updates on a regular basis since 2007. As I am running a hand-made HTML-based website, I have to write the source code of the feed in a text editor, as if I didn't have enough work preparing several updates per week. While the feeds of blogs, forums and other Web 2.0 sites are created automatically, no one ever bothered to provide a software or script that could enable people like me to convert HTML to feeds or back on the fly. Still, every website with a certain reputation is expected to have a feed. I take the effort of creating a feed because I know that some regular visitors like to have all news sources in a feed reader, even if these are only some 300 out of 6000 daily visitors.
In 2009 I signed up with Twitter because some other notable Trek sites were on Twitter too. I didn't expect much, but what I found there was easily the most underwhelming internet innovation of all times.
The most obvious drawback of Twitter is the posting limit of 140 characters. What can I say with just 140 characters? Sorry, that is not sufficient for me. Not by a long shot. I understand that the posting limit allows the tweet to be sent as an SMS from and to a mobile phone. But it is the 21st century, and mobile internet is becoming affordable, with the possibility to switch to e-mail instead of SMS. And while I would not even remotely consider sending out an SMS to an online community, I don't see the need to receive an SMS from Twitter either. Nothing broadcast via Twitter could possibly be so important that I would want to be informed via SMS on my way home. Home to my ultrafast DSL flatrate where I have the whole world on my fingertips, a world that I don't need to and I don't want to be dumbed down to 140-character posts. Overall, the Web 2.0 communities have lost perspective of the amount of information that is useful for a purpose and a given medium. On one occasion they bombard me with dozens of Flash videos on a single page without asking, another time the "news" that people urge me to read at Twitter consists of a few inane words. I don't know which waste of my time I dislike more.
To most people it may be a minor nuisance, but the necessity to shorten links in a tweet is another thing that puts me off. For me as an internet literate it is important to see in advance where a link will lead me: to a news site, to a personal website, to yet another social network? Or to shameless spam (which happens very often), to a porn site, to Nazi propaganda, to malware? Provided that the redirect works at all (which is not always the case), clicking the obfuscated link can become a very unpleasant surprise.
The thing about Twitter that bugs me most is the total absence of a logical structure and the totally missing coherence of the single tweets. Twitter may be the easiest way to spread the word about serious issues like the protests in Iran, but even this may vanish in the white noise of the mindless omnidirectional chatter. In conventional message boards there are topics, and off-topic posts are commonly scorned for very good reasons. In Twitter everything is off-topic by default. I can still try to trace who replied to what, but it requires following links, and trying to find the original tweet is a bottomless pit in most cases. So I often can't tell what two or more people are talking about (and perhaps they don't know themselves?). I was following the tweets of two Trek actors for some time, but I could not make any sense of most of what they were writing, what were the matters on which they replied to other users and to which users they would reply at all. Twitter is a totally chaotic chatter that defies any attempts to order your own trains of thought, much less to create something of substance or to really get to know other people.
Following the example of other big Trek websites, I tried to post at least my site updates on Twitter. I expected that could be done automatically, because I already had the hand-made RSS feed as some sort of admission ticket to the Web 2.0. But in order to get a handy tool called Twitterfeed to work, I had to add a newly standardized date field in my RSS feed, thereby upgrading it to RSS 2.0. In other words, it means even more hand-editing for me and for other webmasters with HTML sites, whose works are increasingly barred from the Web 2.0.
I'm sorry if my rather low opinion on Twitter offends the people, who are obviously having fun there. Twitter may be a good platform for casual discussions that wouldn't be possible elsewhere. It may be great for actors and other celebrities or for people who just imagine they are famous to gather followers there. But its basic principle of 140 characters per post is in strong contrast to my idea of electronic communication, and since I have to take considerable efforts just to re-re-post my own site updates, it more like an unpleasant duty for me to be on Twitter.
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