Tweet this

We tried, we really did.

For several months, we had a "Follow Us On Twitter!" link over there on the right side of your screen. And for about three weeks after we created that link, we strived valiantly to tweet stuff several times a day. Externally, it looked like we were keeping you updated on pop culture news and our mini-opinions about it. Internally, we were using Twitter as a clipboard to hold topic notes.

And then we got bored.

Granted, Twitter is still popular — although not at the insanely intense rate it was earlier this year — with millions of wired people. But frankly, there are limits to our wiredness; we had already begun to rebel against the idea of tweeting when we wrote this and this. And besides, we get our information from the same sources you do (with the addition of a few dozen obscure newspapers and magazines that you've likely never heard of), so it made no sense to try and report breaking news as it happened. By the time we heard about Michael Jackson's death, for example, the Rev. Al Sharpton had already assembled a gospel choir in front of the Apollo Theater to eulogize the fallen former pop star. Tweeting "OMG Michael Jackson is DEAD and we are already formulating theories about the media response to it" would've been silly. And besides, by then we hadn't tweeted in so long, the alert would've scared people grown used to the silence.

Hmm, we thought. Maybe we should tweet when there's a new blog post. But there's a "follow" feature for the blog, and a quick load of our URL would also show if the post is new or not. So this would be like announcing that the newspaper's been printed as the rolled-up paper hits you in the forehead. The only logical response would be: No shit.

We stared at the "Follow Us On Twitter" link, and we thought, and we stared, and we thought, and then we pulled out the shotgun and blasted the cute little bluebird full of #8 pellets.

We probably should have tweeted that we were going to do that. It would have been nicely ironic.