Qwitter

I'm working on a long post about the virtues of withdrawing somewhat from the world of Twitter, Facebook, etc., and this post about Qwitter-- a service that "monitors your twitter account and notifies you when someone stops following you"-- only reinforces my instinct that real-time-updated-and-read social media might not quite be ready for prime time.

My favorite part:

I’ve had 4 people confront me because I stopped following them and Qwitter told them. All 4 of those people were pissed off at me for it. 3 of them had stopped following me to get even. The one who didn’t, well he didn’t follow me to begin with but was still angry, yet in the e-mail he sent me he noted that he didn’t know who I was. The truth is I didn’t know who he was either, don’t remember following him, don’t recall anything he’d ever tweeted about and can only assume I added him by accident at one point when following a reply thread. Qwitter caused negative drama between two people who don’t know each other, have had no interaction, and really no reason for any bad feelings.

Briefly, I'm starting to think that the current generation of instant-update, small-bite social media tools make us too connected to other people in the wrong ways, that they encourage us to sacrifice volume of contact for depth of contact in ways that ultimately are unsatisfying, and promote a highly social version of ADHD. More on this later.