Every once in a while we get wind of incidents that occur in social media, specifically Twitter, where someone practically swallows their feet immediately after posting. As if their fingers we were working faster than the processing center of their brain – either that or they simply had no real regard for the position of other people and were just talking for the sake of talking.

A few incidents that come to mind might be the Attorney General announcing the execution of an inmate on death row via Twitter.

There’s also the Arizona based video producer that sent multiple Tweets about going on vacation, only to find that his home had been burglarized of his expensive video equipment when he returned home with his family.

Or Al Roker Tweeting and taking pictures of fellow jurors that he posted to his Twitter stream, a violation of the court rules.

Dig a little online and you find this kind of activity all over Twitter. Does the service inspire people to make stupid mistakes? Does it inspire it more than any other social network? Perhaps. The brief space that is given for content to be pushed on Twitter gives you little room to push details. 140 characters really isn’t room for anyone to establish deep context or subtle intent such as the case with the execution of the inmate.

It also gives far too much room for people to make broad sweeping statements that are easily misunderstood and misconstrued. As people fire off little one sentence blurbs, they aren’t often considering exactly what they’re saying. What’s worse, many aren’t thinking about what they’re NOT saying when they aren’t saying anything.

Take that into consideration as you also think about the mass of spam that goes on in Twitter. The auto follows, the auto replies, the retweets just for the sake of a retweet (in hopes of getting a little attention) and what you’ve got is a crowd of people that are all trying to crowd surf at the same time.

That won’t work people, someone has to hold the people up and someone has to surf. Otherwise what you have is a pile of people crawling all over one another and it’s just a writhing tangled mess of bodies. That might have been appealing at one time in ancient Greece but not in social media. Twitter is turning out to be a fairly self-centered medium, and I say that with the understanding that there are still plenty of people both giving and taking. Unfortunately, the majority are only taking and they feel that recycling the same stupid quotes is contributing.

The fact is, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of people listening. Many of the people who are listening tend to be listening for selfish reasons as they look to leverage their own position and network, and those remaining few people that actually provide value are going to realize that there are better channels for networking and socialization – whether for personal or business.

In my opinion, Twitter will remain useful to some extent for a select type of people, but the sweeping popularity and user base is going to implode and decline sharply once the novelty wears off.

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