“Should I Tweet?”

In a word, no.

I gave Twitter a good solid month. I followed some people. I posted my own Tweets.

And at the end of it, all I had to show for it was a few good jokes. I found David Pogue of the New York Times the best of the tweeters but even he was rarely wise or witty or informative. Reading his blog provided a filtered and edited version that saved me loads of time.

What’s right with Twitter:

• The ability to post a quick thought without spending hours sweating that your prose is perfect
• The ability to reach lots of people (potentially) immediately.
• The ability to initiate and participate in conversations between lots of people. Post a question and all your followers can jump in with a response.

What’s wrong with Twitter:

• There really aren’t that many people using it.
• Of those that are using it, it’s almost impossible to get the people that matter to follow your tweets
• It’s really tough to get much thought or wisdom in 140 characters so 99% of all tweets are completely useless.

There’s a constant flood of new technologies that we each have to assess and ask ourselves: Is this worth my time? Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, podcasts, blogs, Flikr and on and on.

If you’re online for business, you can use a simple time-in, dollars-out yardstick. Though it’s often hard to keep track of all the time spent and which dollars it produces.

There’s more to it than that, of course.

Twitter does not pass any test of mine. I could see no potential for joy or profit and the time spent was something I’ll never get back.

I predict it will die. I won’t say when.