Tweet this, pal

It was Slate’s turn to dish a disapproving commentary on Twitter this week, and writer Farhad Manjoo had to prop his story up on some pretty rickety legs.  The service is “a waste of time” and an “over-hyped, media-driven sensation.” (And what’s the best way to push back against something that’s being over-hyped in the media? Why, write about it in the media, of course!) Best of all, Manjoo dusts off the old “Many people say” convention to help bolster his thesis:

To vast swaths of the population, though, Twitter is inscrutable: Wait a minute—you want me to keep a perpetual log of my boring life for all the world to see? What if I just spend my free time watching Golden Girls?

The journalistic tiger trap guys like Manjoo always fall into is this: In the absence of any real time spent poking around the service, they rely on the question posed by its developers at the outset…

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

The idea was to create a service through which users could post quotidian tidbits like “At the dry cleaner” or “On the bus,” painting an impressionistic portrait of a vast, always-on, status-addicted technocracy. But Twitter has grown so fast and adapted so freely that that original intent has splintered. Count me in the column that thinks the original intent was a dumbass idea, anyway. And while there’s a cohort on Twitter that still does exactly that, the genius of the site is very simple: You never have to read ‘em. For a service whose limits are as strictly circumscribed as Twitter’s (posts can’t be longer than 140 characters, hence the “micro” in “microblogging”), it offers a surprisingly wide variety of content. There are real celebrities buffing up their personas under the watchful eyes of high-priced social-media consultants, fake celebrities offering up a very specific kind of meta-parody, and a small but growing number of pro and amateur writers whose aim is to test the very limits of the thing — to craft the sharpest, funniest, most polished mini-posts they can. The really interesting stuff on Twitter is being done by guys like Joshua Green Allen, Adam Lisagor and Merlin Mann. Are their tweets journalism? Nope. Are they the kind of narcissistic emo-speak the media seem to feel Twitter is still about? Nope again. What they are is something new, something unique, and something that in its small way is a valuable part of a balanced daily media diet. (Lisagor, by the way, is one of the guys behind Birdhouse, a brand-new iPhone app based on the idea that people who want to write, really write on Twitter need a dedicated notebook program to do it. It’s a swell product, and its promotional video works as both a product introduction and a daffy little piece of filmmaking.)

Manjoo would have known this if he’d taken the time to look around Twitter a little. At 140 characters per, it wouldn’t  have taken that long.