Why I have quit Twitter

Seems there are several others out there with this sort of though, like nearMe and BrightKite, among others. Not to mention, Foursquare is limited to only a few cities in the US. Not anywhere as international as Twitter or other connection media.

Twitter is great as a feed. Follow news, sports, discounts, whatever turns you on or what your competitors or other people in your industry are doing. I run a couple of accounts, each with its own focus. Instant updates and quick.
I might add I really dont care for the most who is having breakfast and who is going to lunch, unless its a bunch of mates.
So Twitter has many uses and the fact that you cannot DM someone if they dont follow you and vice versa will ensure the spam stays minimal.
So Kate, get back on the Twitter band wagon and I agree with Downsy’s first point. I still listen to lots of good 80s music, the Pet Shop boys, legends…

Kate: I’m afraid I read in your post some undertones of the “I-like-their-earlier-albums-before-they-went-commercial” syndrome.
Commercial entities latching onto and experimenting with a new technology or medium doesn’t automatically invalidate it. Nor does its adoption by the “early majority”. Should email still be something to which only those in the education and defence sectors have access, like it was in the 1980s? My 75-year-old mother is a pretty unsophisticated user of email and we all hate penis enlargement spam, but those two facts combined don’t render email useless as a business tool or a marcoms medium, as long as it is used to best advantage.
Lots of brands shouldn’t be on Twitter and they will learn this to their cost. I have written about this with what I think is appropriate scepticism (http://qbrand.blogspot.com/2009/03/why-some-brands-should-not-be-on.html). But other brands will find a way to use the “social” part of social media to converse with or otherwise engage a segment of customers.
And I can only agree with @yakboy in his comments about individuals and social networks continuing to use Twitter, aware of both its power and its limits.

I agree with @yakboy. I enjoy twitter because it’s like being in a chatroom only with people I actually like. I tune in when I need a break and let most of it fly past.
I think you’re wrong about people assuming that if you’ve said it on twitter then everyone must have read it – unless I’ve @replied or DMd someone I can’t assume that people have read what I’ve said – twitter isn’t something that you go back and read what you missed – it’s for reading what is happening right now.
Also I find it entertaining to know that my friends are on the bus or eating a sandwich (not so much when they are on the loo).

You might understand twitter more if you come to terms with the fact that “social media” is more about the “social” than the “media”.
The people who really enjoy twitter are the ones who interact with each other: reply to each other’s tweets, discuss the news of the day, play word games with hashtags and basically talk to one another.
Of course twitter isn’t very interesting for those who just use it as a broadcast medium. The idea of “micro-blogging” is nonsensical. Anyone can see that you can’t write anything of massive substance in 140 characters.
But, as any SMS-junkie knows, it’s enough to have a good chat with someone – as long as the communication is two-way. And twitter extends these two-way conversations into many-way conversations.
How can you leverage this sort of chat-room style socialising into market power? Honestly, I’m not sure you can.
Unless people already care about whatever it is you’re trying to sell, they aren’t going to listen to your tweets about that brand. And, unless you have an active and interesting presence on twitter that includes interaction outside your marketing angle, people aren’t going to listen to you at all.
Twitter’s kind of like a party, and if a door-to-door salesman shows up at the door, you’re not likely to invite him in for a cocktail.

Interesting point Kate:) I think the solution is to filter though. I am having the same problems with blogs – very often people post things I don’t want to read about and synchronizing their RSS feeds has lot of noise – it is like buying the Sunday’s newspaper and reading only the travel section; you throw away all the flyers inside anyway.
I use Yahoo Pipes to filter my RSS feeds and I also created certain groups in TweetDeck to filter content only from certain people. This works for me for now.

Hi Kate,
Some interesting perspectives Kate. :-)
I came to your post via Twitter. No-one emailed me to it and I doubt it would have gotten a mention on any of the blogs/news sites I read. Ironic.
I’m still learning about this new network myself and don’t have all the answers however I think you need to just stop following anyone who posts noise.
Twitter makes it quick and easy to post things that perhaps don’t deserve the time to write a blog post. Also, it forces brevity. (Something this comment lacks.)
– Mike

great article Kate! i see things in Twitterland changing too, but I see Twitter using that $55 million to evolve the service into something better. what do i mean by better? imagine a Twitter that had mechanisms to filter noise. search that took out the sandwich eating, the day to day, & focused in on the real things that people had to say. once (hopefully) it gets there maybe we will see a different kind of divide happening. one where people are given credit for what they know and not just for who they are.
– jason nadaf