Some of you are probably on Twitter. Some of you may enjoy Twitter. For me, it was simple. It was not helping me. It wasn’t necessarily hurting me either. It was just there. There were few real social moments or sharing of ideas. My local photographer following is on Instagram, not Twitter. My one local follower on Twitter can text or call me whenever she wants (ironically I met her on Twitter, but she is an exception). There was no tangible community incentive to stick around.

What there is a lot of – based on my photography sample, anyway – is self-promotion, “here I am!” photos, offers of eBooks I don’t want, robotic invitations to like someone on Facebook, retweets of classic pics (very worthwhile but accessible elsewhere), and way too many #FF mentions. Artistically, it provided some decent viewing pleasure. Conversationally, it’s a bore. Socially, it’s faux.

Again, this applies to artists and photographers but based on my overall experience with it that can be extended to general users too. “Lulz”, snark, and I’m smarter than you cleverness is not a good social experience for me. Nor is using it as a social weapon.

Twitter, like its sister Facebook, is just big, but not meaningful. It might be the sometimes fun urban downtown to FB’s gated suburb, but it’s not going to usher in some new era of enlightenment. Quite the contrary, actually. You could have thousands of followers, and still be lonely. You could be retweeted a bunch, and still eat alone. It’s fleeting.

In practical business terms, it’s non-essential. Yes, Twitter can be used for amazing things but the amazing applies to perhaps 1% of its use (that’s a guess folks, based solely on my Americanized experience). And, quite frankly, anyone who judges a person based only on Twitter numbers – high or low – is not someone I’m interested in. The same principle applies to someone who judges based only on a tweet without any context, unless the tweets are consistently over-the-top awful. Communication and thought is truncated enough these days, I don’t need anymore of that sad trend than necessary.

Now before you call me a luddite know that I have an iPad, iPod, and iPhone. I have a laptop computer. I blog here, I was on Facebook, and once upon a time I MySpaced. I have other websites. My Boxee Box is still used! If our Net and mobile experience is a mosaic of self-selected personalization then my deactivation of Twitter is really no different than wiping one paint away from the easel, with the intention of adding a new one.

Why would any of you here in the WordPress community care about this? Hell if I know. But where else can I vent about my breakup with Twitter?