Why I don’t really use Twitter: It’s doomed.

As everyone on the Internet has probably already heard, my BFF Chloe Filson recently accused me of being awful at Twitter on her popular egg-pun website Real Life Artist. As you can see by the below chart, she has detected that my nascent Twitter account is in fact maintained by a robot while my my blog, Flickr photostream and LinkedIn profile indicate a human being and my Facebook profile is questionable.  Below are her findings:

Figure 1: Chloe’s analysis of my social network activity. Click to expand.

She also provides the following pie chart of my 42 tweets to date:

Figure 2: Yucky pie made out of my robot tweets

So is it true that my Facebook and Twitter accounts are being maintained by robots?  That’s ridiculous!  And true.  Ridiculously true.  The only reason I joined Twitter because of the number of robots available to help me share the activity I care about to some of the networks I care less about.  My friend Dakshana has also called me out for using Twitter as my very own real life WUPHF.

I performed my own little analysis of Chloe’s 497 tweets since she joined the network on 21 February 2011.

Figure 3: Delicious pie made of Chloe’s tweets

As you can see in the above pie chart, most of Chloe’s tweets are about tea.  While I cannot claim to have done an actual study her tweets like she did of mine, I will claim that my pie is prettier than hers.  Just look at it.  Mine is all three dimensional and textured.  Just look.  It is true that Chloe used Twitter to openly conspire with Stephanie Doig about how they were going to call me out for being bad at Twitter, something I would have seen if I wasn’t so bad at Twitter.

So far Chloe’s campaign has earned six ‘likes’ on Facebook, one ‘like’ on WordPress and one supportive comment on the blog post while another commenter wants me to be his life coach even though he has a much better life (and blog) than me. That makes it a total of 10 people who openly care about by horrible tweeting.  Not a very impressive number, especially if you compare it to the 39 people who have joined the Facebook group “if 1 000 000 people join they will ban COLSLAW !!!!” [sic].  It is also interesting to note that most of the ten people who joined Chloe’s campaign are among those who I threatened by name in my speech at Chloe’s wedding.  Who knows what their true motives are.

Figure 4: The Internet doesn’t care that I am bad at Twitter

The end of Twitter is nigh and we know when

You know who else doesn’t want me to use Twitter?  The universe, that’s who.  Twitter is doomed.  This rest of this post is dedicated to the over 200 million registered Twitter users who have been investing this platform with their quips, insights and impersonations of Star Wars characters.

To do some research on the fate of Twitter, I partnered with Real Life Scientist and Real Life Chloe-husband Robin Wilson and his Real Life Buddy Berkley Staite.  In order to select an appropriate stand-in for Twitter in our doomsday calculations, Robin and Berkley provide the following analysis.  If you don’t understand it, that’s okay – you probably don’t have an advanced degree in science.

1) ‘Chloe Filson’ almost sort of rhymes with ‘Tony’s cinnamon bunn’.

Figure 5: Tony with his bunn

2) Tony built Monstro LAN-D, the fourth of seven LANs made up of ungodly tentacle networking and terrifying many-eyed hubs.

Figure 6: Montstro LAN-D

3) Monstro LAN-D was built by Pheer McQuink, a half-legged clock salesman.  His motto is “Would you like to buy a-HO-HO-HO-CLOCK?”

Figure 7: Pheer McQuink selling clocks

4) “HO-HO-HO-CLOCK” looks like a string of modified Starship Enterprises (from Star Trek) being pulled by CLOCK which is almost the same as Nugbert (both words are a single letter in height).

Figure 8: Nugbert pulls some Enterprises

15) Nugbert, the helpful ship-pulling clock, under the alias Sam-I-Am met Jean-Luc Picard on twitter, and they’re totally rad pals.

Figure 9: It all comes full circle

To review:

Chloe Filson = Tony’s cinnamon bunn = Monstra LAN D = HO-HO-HO-clock = Nugbert the clock = Twitter.  Chloe Filson is Twitter.  Twitter is Chloe Filson. 

Now that we have concluded that, the next question is as to the fate of Twitter now that we know that it is Chloe Filson.  Consider the following indisputable facts:

1) Chloe Filson = Twitter (see above).

2) Chloe was born on 6 December 1984 and died 27 August 2008 when I hosted a fake funeral for her instead of a going away party before she moved to Israel.  By that point she had lived 8,665 days.

Figure 10: Me delivering an eulogy at Chloe’s funeral next to her taxidermied corpse. 

3) In 1984, the average lifespan of a Canadian woman was 79.9 years.  Chloe therefore lived out only 29.7% of her lifespan.

4) According to Audubon Magazine reader and Twitter user Vernon Gauthier, the bird in the Twitter logo is a Blue Jay.

Figure 11: Blue Jay

Figure 12: Blue Jay

Figure 13: Blue Jay

5) The longest recorded lifespan of the Blue Jay is 16 years and 4 months.

6) Twitter launched on 15 July 2006.

7) According to her third grade Language Arts notebook, when Chloe was nine years old, she knew 12 monsters (see below table).  Now that Chloe is 26 years old, it is logical to presume that she must know 35 monsters by now if she has continued to follow the same pace of monster-knowledge.

Figure 14: Monsters Chloe knew at nine years old

Figure 15: Rate of Chloe’s monster-knowledge

Therefore:

29.7% [Chloe’s lifespan fulfillment] x 16 years and 4 months [Blue Jay’s lifespan] = 4.85 years or 1,776 days

4.85 years or 1,776 days + 15 July 2006 [Twitter’s launch date] = 26 May 2011

So if Chloe is Twitter and Twitter is a Blue Jay, Twitter should have died on 26 May 2011.  It didn’t.  Clearly we need to add a correction factor.  This is where the monsters come in:

26 May 2011 + 35 monsters = 30 June 2011

That’s right – Thursday, 30 June of this year Twitter is going to end somehow.  Bold prediction?  Robin and I feel the math speaks for itself.

And that, Chloe, is why I do not really use Twitter.

Figure 16: Similarly good math from an xkcd comic