I have met some cool people through twitter, and I enjoy the little mini fragmented conversations I have there.
But here's what I don't like about twitter: somebody's always quoting or linking to Seth Godin. Seth Godin is apparently a marketing expert, one whose primary expertise seems to be marketing himself as The Only One Who Sees Clearly How The Internet is Changing Everything.
Publishing folks in particular are kind of obsessed with How The Internet Is Changing Everything these days, and well they might be, and so many of them quote Seth and link to Seth, and nobody yet has explained to me why I'm supposed to care what this guy thinks. He ran a book packaging company. He started a cultish website touted on wikipedia as "one of the 500 most visited websites in the world." (I am suspicious of those stats, as only one porn site is listed in the top 50.) And he's written a lot of books about marketing.
But this doesn't mean that he knows the future or that his pronouncements about what businesses have to do to survive should be taken especially seriously. Probably like most prognosticators, he'll be right sometimes and wrong other times. And the fact that he says something gives it no additional weight in my mind.
Think for yourself! The hell with that guy! Or, if you want to slavishly follow the pronouncements of a self-styled expert, I'm right here!
