YJL

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 couldn’t 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 don’t 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 didn’t update yet.

Please don’t get me wrong, it’s not as if Twitter is a bad or poor service. It’s 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. It’s 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 people’s 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 don’t read tweets anymore, at least not those without me being mentioned.