Remember when Twitter started growing a few years back…the talk back then was how stupid the website was and that no one cared about what you had for lunch or breakfast. Remember having those discussions? I do. Not sure what happened, but that popular opinion soon became less popular and people (including me) began to use Twitter and Facebook to post/tweet about nonsense. I would tweet about having lunch at Chipotle, my trip to Hawaii or the cool shoes I just bought for my son. I actually thought this was cool. But in fact, I was just doing what everyone else was doing and not tweeting or posting with any purpose.

Yes I know, there’s no harm in showing a little transparency or posting about friendly random things. No not at all, but when it goes on for a couple years with no end in sight, it’s a bit much. Twitter and Facebook has become a global digital water cooler that runs non-stop. In a time when there is so much information to consume, so much “stuff” to get done, so much work to do, so many important things to try to consume in our lives, the last thing we need is to waste precious minutes in our days reading random opinions (i.e. tweets) or what people had for lunch. Heck, I love my wife to death but I wouldn’t need to know what she’s doing every single hour in the day.

So what exactly am I saying here, what’s the point of this rant? My feeling is that tools like Twitter would be much more valuable if we thought of our tweets as we do with blog posts. We should think about what we tweet before we tweet. Is it helpful, motivational, positive and/or valuable to those that will read it? I think if we all started to adapt this mind set, Twitter and other social platforms would become more useful rather than a waste of our valuable time.