It's called my blog.
(I realize I am in the middle of a five-part series about online fundraising sources for non-profits, so consider this the non-commercial break.)
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UPDATE Jan. 12 2009 I no longer hate Twitter. Some good people convinced me to stay on, including but not limited to many of my old Twitter pals, but also plenty of new, quality ones sent my way by @Armano. I feel the need to iterate that I was serious about leaving. It's just, sometimes, well, I'm wrong.
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After three months of giving Twitter the old college try, I've decided Twitter can go piss up a rope. It's not that Twitter isn't addictive or compelling. Many times I have spent hours on end tweeting, reading other people's tweets, clicking the links in said tweets, checking out the profile links for the many different Tweeple to see what my fellow Tweeple do when they are not tweeting, and of course twiddling around with all the different awesome Twitter apps du jour like TweetDeck, Twhirl, Twellow, and Twatter. (Yes, I made that last one up, but I'm sure someone will see this, invent a Twitter-based hooker hotline app by that name, and sell it for $1,200 on SitePoint all within 24 hours like Twlpy did.)
I witnessed some fascinating things unfold on Twitter. For example, I proudly watched as t-shirt model extraordinaire Jason Sadler embarked on his year-long expedition to wear a different branded t-shirt every day for a year.
Cried, as marketing visionary David Armano unleashed the philanthropic power of his network on an indigent mother of three, raising over $7,000 in less than 48 hours to help her escape an abusive relationship.
Laughed, as idiot blowhard blogosphere critic Loren Feldman (a.k.a. the Arrington Family's Lurch) systematically rendered his wildly successful vlog moot by deleting all the video files.
I also was privy to an unstoppable mudslide of boring, boring, boring spam from nameless finance experts, daily minutia from acquaintences, and obligatory reports like "I'm working" and "I'm tired".
Twanks, but no thanks. Hey, I can watch these people do their thing in other ways, like, oh, I don't know, on their blogs. With a blog, if you have something to say, you can say it in 140 characters or less, you can say it in a word, a whisper, you can say it in a novella or a Moby Dick, with a video or on an MP3, on a plane or even, yes, in a train.
You can do it all with a blog. And now they have these things called RSS readers whereby you can actually read all your favorite blogs in one convenient location! That is so neat! So useful, so not-limiting! So Web 1.0, and SO SUPERIOR to Twitter that I don't even know why I tried Twitter in the first place.
The power of the crowd, that's what got me. The crowd had convinced me that there was truly some value in being limited to 140 characters or less. I applied the same logic I had applied when, at my first church experience at the age of six, I loudly concluded of the belief in God, "Well Mom, if all these people think it's true, it must be true!" (I'll bet the other churchgoers just loved that.)
After all, the power of the crowd is what the Twitter spirit is all about, and it is growing FAST. Heck, right now is probably the worst time for me to quit, considering that in 2008 Twitter's membership grew 752% to a total of 4.5 million users.
Or maybe that means now is the best possible time. Who's with me? Can I get a witness? Drop some comments on my awesome blog.
