David Akin shook the Twittersphere to its core with this tweet tonight:
davidakin I'm de-twittering. http://tinyurl.com/bg6a3m
He elaborated at this blog post:
I've been on Twitter now for -- I don't know -- six or seven months now. Can't see much use for it and, frankly, in terms of the time and bandwidth I'm wasting, it ain't worth it. So i'm de-Twittering or un-Twittering. I will be an ex-Tweeter.
Reason? Basically, there's nothing I'm getting from the Twitter folks I follow that I can't get in person, via e-mail, via RSS or via the good old-fashioned phone.
You may have a different Twitter experience, of course, and I'm not saying Twitter is bad. For journalists, Twitter, had its one shining moment, so far as I can tell, during the Mumbai terrorist attacks. (I've heard there were lots of cool Tweets as that Airbus landed on the Hudson river.)
But as party of my daily/hourly digital toolbox and with more and more tools showing up on the Internet, I think you've got to make some decisions about what's useful and why. Digg, for example, seems like a useful tool for newsroom managers and assignment editors but for the blue-collar grunts like me out there pounding the digital pavement, Digg, Twitter, and services like it are just time-wasters.
If you don't know Mr. Akin, be advised he is hardly a luddite. He's been ahead of most Canadian journalists when it has come to experimenting with new technologies, be it in the areas of computer-assisted reporting or getting on Facebook.
I had this to say about his withdrawal:
RT @davidakin I'm de-twittering. http://tinyurl.com/bg6a3m. Oh well. Thing is, I learned nothing from his tweets.
Which, sadly, is true for the most part. He's on the Hill. He's off the Hill. Waahoo.
If he didn't get much out of Twitter, it's possible that's because he didn't put much in.
But I think he's right. One needs to focus their time and energy on things that provide the most return. Akin values Facebook, Google Reader and Google Notebook -- along with old skool email.
Actually, he's got a lot of good stuff to say. It's worth reading the whole post -- although I really confesss to shaking my head about how he finds the search capabilities of Twitter lacking when compared to, say, Google.
I don't know if Twitter has made me a better reporter (I'm a writer for ctvtoronto.ca). The one case where it might have helped was with the west end blackout of Jan. 15-16. If you click through, notice the link we put in a link to Twitter so people could search the #darkTO hash tag.
Methinks the benefit of Twitters accrue as you build a better network. I learn a lot about my craft and to a certain extent, I can learn a bit more about the city I live in and write about.
But I'm not counting on Twitter to do the journalistic heavy-lifting for me. Reporting is an active pursuit, not a passive one.
While I wouldn't count myself as a social media expert (I'm one of the few who aren't), my opinion is that to get something out of a social medium, you have to be, well, social.
I suspect I'll be sticking with Twitter for some time yet.