Joel Spolsky on Twitter:

Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in which the most complicated thought you can think is one sentence long. It’s a cacophony of people shouting their thoughts into the abyss without listening to what anyone else is saying. Logging on gives you a page full of little hand grenades: impossible-to-understand, context-free sentences that take five minutes of research to unravel and which then turn out to be stupid, irrelevant, or pertaining to the television series Battlestar Galactica. I would write an essay describing why Twitter gives me a headache and makes me fear for the future of humanity, but it doesn’t deserve more than 140 characters of explanation, and I’ve already spent 820.

I couldn’t agree more.

I will also be far from being the first to say it, but Twitter is just a poor reimplementation of IRC over HTTP, which is completely inappropriate. Twitter is a constant failure with bad uptime, scalability issues and over-centralization. Twitter is one of the worst things that happened to the Web; it also promotes URL shorteners, which have security issues and double the possible unavailabilities.

Yet another case of trying to be too clever with randomness!