Following on from my recent post about quitting facebook, it would seem that despite reports about social network fatigue, millions of people out there are still obsessed with telling you they are in the line for a latte, and there seems to be no sign that the masses are growing tired of that shit!

The cool kids are now upping their dose of the social net by now updating their facebook status as well as ‘tweeting’ to the watching world using Twitter, a social network that restricts its users to status updates of no more than 140 characters.

But when our attention spans are no longer able to stay focused to the end of the 140 characters limit of a ‘tweet’ we’ll need to condense our shit down yet again and find a new service to tell everyone that we’re ‘in lne 4 latte @ strbks.”

Enter stage left – Flutter. Squeeze your minute by minute existence into a 26 character limited ‘flap’ that your followers will be able to read in a third of the time they used to spend reading your ‘tweets.’ Flutter will even take your facebook status updates and your tweets and compress them for you! (See the video below.)

Okay, so flutter isn’t real. But the scary thing is that it took you a few moments of watching that video to be sure it was a spoof, and if that doesn’t highlight how dumb this social networking gig is, then nothing will!

Speaking at the South by Southwest tech conference in May, cyberpunk writer, Bruce Sterling, controversially suggested that the clearest symbol of poverty is dependence on “connections” like the Internet, Skype and texting. “Poor folk love their cellphones!” He said.

According to Sterling, “the man of leisure savors solitude, or intimacy with friends — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.”

I don’t really agree with his take on the ‘social net’ but I do think there is something to his theory that connections are liabilities that we pretend are assets.

I know, I know, Twitter and the like can have some good uses. In fact a group of friends and I will be using Twitter to ‘microblog’ our trek to John O’Groats in a £100 car this August. Will doing that will make me see the value of being a ‘twit’ I wonder?

Of course, as more of us get ‘smart phones’ the possibilities greatly expand for social network fans. I just hope that iPhone users who use ‘Toilet tracker‘ and the crap filled social networks know that there are some lines you just don’t cross when sharing your shit.

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What the heck is twitter?
Why I don’t get facebook
Get your face on my blog
Connectivity is poverty