twitter fail blog

Huge, monumental, world-changing event today. In case you haven’t heard, Steve Jobs quit his job at Apple. Millions of Apple fanatics are in despair, and yet, the world still revolves on its axis.

Why should you care? We’re trying to find a reason, and it escapes us. Yeah, he did some pretty amazing things with computers, and we love computers almost as much as our family, okay, sometimes way more than our family, but it’s just computers.

One of those lost souls (who we were following, who was following us) waxed poetic in an endless stream of tweets about the hero, Steve Jobs. We responded with “Comparing innovation to the people who put their life on the line? Steve Jobs is no hero.” And then, the dude totally lost it. (We’re not posting the actual tweets here, because we don’t have enough money to pay for his therapy.) He complained about being attacked by strangers on twitter, and said (even though he has nearly 50,000 tweets) “this is why I don’t post on twitter very often.” (cue laughter)

Seriously, dude, get over it. Your announcement that you’re thinking of leaving twitter is so Stephen Fry. Whining until your followers (who think you’re somebody important because you have a lot of followers, and follow you because you have a lot of followers) begged you not to leave is too emo for words. And then, your post: “I have closed my Twitter account. If you want to follow me, you can now find me at twitterstar.com. Thank you.” while you continue to post on twitter, is downright pathetic.

We’ll stop picking on Steve Job’s love child for a moment and focus on the big picture, because we see this happen all the time.

The truth of the matter is… it’s only 140 characters. Unless you’re a professional copywriter with a couple of Masters Degrees (Hi Susan!) or have written, edited, rewritten, reviewed, and rewritten that tweet again before posting it, there’s a 99.9999999% chance someone, and most likely lots of someones, will misunderstand, misconstrue, disagree with, and quote out of context in order to make you look stupid, your simple tweet. There’s just no way to perfectly convey the perfect thought consistently 50,000 times. And to expect that everyone is going to agree with you, understand the deeper meaning you’re trying to convey, and support your every word is absolute lunacy.

It’s just twitter.

If the same words were said face-to-face, you’d hear the inflection, read the body language, and most likely, enter into a conversation. Unless you’re a total douche-canoe. In which case, we’re glad we stopped following you.

Deal with it.

Without a complicated series of emoticons, it’s pretty hard to phrase something in the exact way necessary to make sure everyone is in perfect agreement, and nobody’s feelings are hurt. In fact, it would be pretty boring if we tried to make it so. The misunderstandings and confusion are part of the general chaos that makes twitter so wonderful.

Preserve your little piece of sanity. Step back, switch to Google+ or Facebook, and chill. It’s all just a few words on the screen between people who know each other very superficially. When you come back in 5 minutes or 5 months, twitter will be more or less the same as you left it, and we probably won’t even notice you weren’t there.

And, to Steve Jobs, if you’re reading this (as if): You did a darned good job at that computer company. Your marketing genius turned customers into crazy fans who now can’t even bring themselves to play D&D until they know for sure what you’re going to do next. We should all be so talented, and loved. Good luck dude, and good health.