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John McCain is on his way to the Senate Floor!

I dunno about this Twitter thing...

A week after posting "I'm starting to see the possibilities...", I'm having doubts about the value of this thing. Again.

I'm currently following 57 fellow Twitterers, including fellow Web professionals; U.S. Congresspeople and other statesmen/stateswomen; people from the entertainment world; some journalists; and a small number of friends. (I have also already UNfollowed a bunch of people.)

I have been checking fellow Twitterers' updates regularly and have posted only three updates myself. (I also read Tweats from Twitterers I do not follow.)

With no offense intended to anyone I follow on Twitter or to anyone else, I must say that my dominant impression at this point is disappointment.

Some of the journalists sometimes post heads-ups about (with links to) news articles on their blogs. I don't really need to read those Tweats, though, because I'm seeing those headlines from my RSS reader (FeedDemon) and reading the articles that are of interest to me.

Some of the Web professionals sometimes post heads-ups about (with links to) articles of theirs on their blogs. But as above, I don't need to read those Tweats; I'm seeing the headlines in FeedDemon and reading the blog entries that are of interest to me.

For some of the entertainers (especially the comedians), Twitter is the new back-of-the-napkin: every potentially funny thought is Tweated for all of us to see. I'm reminded of a favorite "Frazier" episode in which Frazier asks Niles, "Have you ever had an unexpressed thought?" (Niles replies, "I just had one.")

Surprisingly, so many Twitterers (journalists and Web developers among them) devote most of their Tweets to the little mundane things they're "doing now". This was my initial great fear about Twitter: that the single most annoying and obnoxious feature of Facebook was being elevated to the level of a Web site dedicated to WHAT EVERYONE IS DOING NOW.

Do I really care who the news anchor is having lunch with?

Why does John McCain (suddenly so technologically cool) think we care that he's "on my way to the Senate floor"? Isn't that what senators have to do to get to their place of employment?

And what's with this adult fascination with video games? I never imagined that so many of the people I consider important thinkers in the world of Web development would be such video game fanatics. Insofar as the last video game I played was "Pong", I really don't care.

Maybe these curmudgeonly comments of mine say more about me than about Twitter.

That said, my impression at this point is that Twitter is a tool in its infancy, offering a lot more stuff I don't care about than stuff I do care about.

If I weren't in the Internet biz, I probably would have given up on Twitter already.

(By the way, I would have Tweated this, but I haven't figured out how to compress all this to 140 characters.)