The Real Issues and the Trivia

For my sins, I recently joined the Twitter community. I had made a conscious decision to keep away from Social Networking (apart from LinkedIn which I regard as a business tool), but having been invited to join Facebook and become slightly addicted, I finally succumbed and went the whole hog, so I guess I'm now a Facebooking Twitteree.

To indulge my cravings I use a variety of 'tools' on a number of different platforms, Flock and Tweetdeck on my Macs, and Twitterific Premium on my iPhone. I have been completely overwhelmed by the Twitterific community and it's reaction to the recent so-called Twitpocalypse. For those of you in the dark, the Twitpocalypse refers to a Year 2000 type bug in which Twitter applications crash after a certain internal counter exceeds its boundary.

Twitterific users became a bunch of jibbering idiots because they were unable to get their fixes because their favourite tool was broken and updates were not instantly available. Tweet after tweet referred to the tweeter's despair, anger, fury, disloyalty, and every other emotion. All this at the same time as the Iranian election was reducing that country to genuine news meltdown and lockdown.

While I understand the frustration caused when tools fail (but let's remember that there were plenty of work arounds), it makes me really mad that people cannot seem to tell the difference between real issues and trivia - or sometimes even if they can, they are so self-centered that they choose to ignore those differences.