I have to confess I took Twitter off my phone and my iPad.

The iPad was the first to fall but I questioned whether I could live without it on my phone. I’ve a lot of friends on Twitter, I’ve tended to get a lot of my news from there and lately, I seem to have found it causes me to feel angry a lot. I don’t think I’m alone here.

I also started reading books recently and on balance, I seem to feel a greater sense of achievement for reading a book, even if its on a kindle, than I do for reading 8000 tweets. For one, some tweet will turn up at least 30 times (cf, NYT piece on Tuam or the Irish Times piece on the Gate Theatre last Saturday – and no, I am not linking them). I don’t need to be told to read the same article that often.

I was kind of busy yesterday – it was Urban Sketching day in Luxembourg – so today is really the first day that I’ve had time but no twitter. I can’t be bothered retrieving the password so that I can sign into it on the browser and anyway, that’s not the point. What is the point is that I got a spectacular amount of things done around the house (I’m on my holidays) today up to and including 3 trips to the recycling centre, mostly paper it must be said as I had accumulated many magazines and newspapers. I got laundry done. I went out to lunch and browsed pinterest and tried to find out how much a pair of pointe shoes would cost me on the Repetto website.

In a way, I think Twitter has lost its way (well I would, and then you could also ask, did it ever really have a way). It’s hard for users to tune although at least you can be allowed to get tweets more or less in chronological order except the execrable decision to allow you to see when other people like other tweets, which is how I regularly get to see links to the same articles in the mass media ALL the time). They make a big deal of features people don’t want, like 280 character messages, which they then give to people like Julian Assange for who knows what reason. I don’t have 280 characters and I dislike the feeling of it being used as a class marker in Twitter like the blue tick mark is.

But the problem is, the noise to signal ratio has gotten more noisy and when it boils down to it, is my life going to be noticeably worse off if I get my news through the BBC website rather than retweeted five dozen times on Twitter? I’m not staying out of it completely but an interesting change in my life once I stopped being a developer is that I spent significantly less time at my home desktop writing code for no real reason. The net result is I will be spending less time on Twitter for the foreseeable future. I can occasionally be found on Facebook if you’re badly stuck to contact me.