My Twitter fast continues. I've looked at it for less than 15 minutes each for the last two days. As I tweeted yesterday:

I thought that I would miss Twitter like an addict craving a fix. Instead it felt more like having a hypnotist cure a nervous tic overnight.

Garrick van Buren forwarded me a link to this guy's Twitter skepticism. What's interesting that his issues and mine seem to be equal and opposite. He thinks people use @replies when they should use more direct messages. I prefer to have everything public unless there is a compelling reason to take it private. He doesn't like the abandonment of the "What are you doing" conceit, and I think that is the most boring frigging thing ever. If he got his way, I'd abandon Twitter in a heartbeat. The service he describes holds even less value than Twitter currently holds for me.

I've grown weary of the way Twitter leaves a kind of jangly feeling, like having three cups of coffee too many. There is always something coming in and more behind that. I see lots of people saying things like "I'm turning off Twitter for a while, I need to get things done." Twitter is cute but it's hard to get things done and pay attention to it. If you don't pay attention to it constantly, you lose a lot of the power of it. It's a conundrum and one I am having a hard time finding a reasonable balance with.

And just because I don't feel like writing a full post to encapsulate this link, I will admit that my Twitter contrarianism could be just as misguided as this Robin Hobb rant about blogging, in which she does her level best to sound like Harlan Ellison on the subject. I'm a little chagrined how much her piece has in common with mine, in that she thinks blogging kills writing and (at least for me) twittering seems to kill my blogging. The only part that resonates with me is the idea that one activity can subtract the urgency and energy to do the other. I've decided that I like the value blogging creates for me, which is different than the value of twittering. Each to his or her own.