So Mr. MG Seigler over at TechCrunch thinks he’s avant-garde for deciding to quit emailing for a month. His reasoning has something to do with it being a waste of time. And the idea came from…wait for it…some Tweeting. Yes, Twitter, that endless fount of useless information.

I’m not here to rail on Mr. Seigler though, other than to point out that Facebook and Twitter will either a) destroy our society, or b) die, just like MySpace. Why’s this? Because both Facebook and Twitter are founded on the premise that you can easily make your thoughts, opinions, and (private?) pictures instantly available to a whole host of people who don’t really care about you.

I tried Twitter, and it was a complete waste of time, and endless roll of pointless drivel (“enjoying some jameson on the couch, sit up unable to follow along with my own timeline”) and links to articles I don’t care to read (and don’t have time to read). Mr. Seigler is annoyed at the time spent sifting through and reading endless emails, and yet he’s thrilled at the usefulness of Twitter because the President used it once? Sanity, please. (The link tries to make a point about how you, too, can be heard, by mentioning that the Pres answered a handful out of 169,395 Tweeted questions?)

Let me break it down for you: life is not about spewing your opinions to the unwashed masses (yet, how hypocritical it is for me to blog this…). It’s about relationships–with God and mankind. You don’t maintain any sort of real relationship facebook stalking someone. You don’t know others and be known by them in 140 characters or less. All you do is waste time, wishing you lived someone else’s life or trying to re-write yours by hooking up with old flames. In the process, you work less, live less, and get fatter sitting in front of your computer.

To be fair, we could say the same thing about many other popular things such as Netflix instant streaming, except Netflix lacks the narcissism of Twitter and Facebook. If you’re constantly updating your status, let me just tell it to you straight: NOBODY CARES. If they DO care at all, it’s because of how well they already know you offline, in the real world, or because your dietary habits are really the most important thing in their life (which is either really sad or really scary). Log off and pick up the phone (txting doesn’t count). Better yet, go grab a coffee with someone. Even better yet, have them over for dinner.

So here’s your choices, America: become so self-involved that society self-destructs, or realize what’s important in life and go build yourself into a self-strengthening community.

Quit wasting your life and start sharing it. Spend some time with God. Spend some time with the people He’s put in your life.

Thankfully, many of you already figured this out.

I set up a new blog today over at eustaceclarence.com to provide easy updates on my first kid, and it got me thinking: thankfully, the personal blogging craze has largely died.

To wit: of the 5 links in my blogroll as of the time of this writing, the last updates were written:

1. October 31, 2007
2. March 29, 2010 (Previous before that was Jan 2, 2009)
3. September 27, 2009
4. July 22, 2009
5. …and one blog is no longer available on the internet

All of these blogs were written by guys involved with technology at a higher-than-average level: they could all probably tell you what AJAX is, and why IE6 is the bane of all that is internet. Yet, like 99.9% of people who started blogging in the last 5 years, none of them blog anymore.

Why? Because no one has time to write (much less write well), and for those that do…nobody cares. The only posts on this blog than anyone reads are the ones written on how to fix annoying computer problems, not the ones about my thoughts on the latest political whatnot. The only personal blog I read anymore is my sister-in-law’s, because she puts up great pictures of her kids all the time. (Ideally, Eustace will get similar treatment from me).

What it really boils down to though is that no one has enough time for all of that. Myspace died when everyone realized that the cacaphony of colors, spam, ads, and random musings available there was an utter waste of time. Twitter’s in vogue, but I’m pretty sure most people use it for a month or two before they realize that, too, is a completely ridiculous way to waste every spare minute of peace and quiet you might stumble upon during your day. I’m moving on.

I think Facebook is the big thing with the best chance, but I’m hearing a lot of people who are sick of it and despise the time they waste on it (me included)–it’s an addiction though, like a crackberry, and will likely last a few years before the next big thing comes along. It’s darn handy for planning class reunions or the like, but for doing anything else worthwhile? Not so much.

Sooner or later we’ll all melt down from the stress and insanity that comes from being plugged into too many people, too many streams of info, and too many responsibilities 24/7. As for me, I’m just hoping that a move back to the Dakotas/Minnesota might bring a few more years of sanity…

For an actually well-thought perspective on this over-saturation phenomena, you could read the paper I wrote on it for a class I took (Like Butter Spread Over Too Much Bread: Multiphrenia in America 10 pages, .pdf)…or you could just ADHD your way back to your Twitter feed and forget I mentioned it (though, kudos for lasting this long if you made it to the end of my post!)

If you’re comfortable with trying to use Terminal (or curious to start), you can get your twitter updates via growl on OS X. If you don’t know what growl is, you’re really missing out. Get it here — it updates you unobtrusively with program status messages that might typically show up in a popup box or embedded into a program window, or not at all.

Once you’ve got growl, you’ll need to make sure you have Ruby 1.8.3 or higher.

You’ll also need MacPorts to make this work right: Install MacPorts

• If you have 10.5 Leopard, you’re set
• If you have 10.4 Tiger, you’ll probably need to update:
  1. Open a Terminal window and type in the following command, hitting return at the end:
     sudo port install ruby

Now, we’ll install some stuff that we need for our script to run. Using terminal, enter these commands (Hit return after each one)

sudo port install rb-rubygems
sudo gem install xml-simple
sudo gem install ruby-growl


(If the “gem” commands don’t work, you may need to restart terminal before running them)

Provided this all went well, you should be ready to install the script. Download the Squawk Scriptand move it into your home directory (looks like a house in finder if you’re totally lost here). This file is thanks to damien, but I had to make a tweak for it to all work right. You have to edit the file with your login info:

sudo pico ~/squawk.rb

It should be obvious where to put your email address and password.

Finally, run your script!

ruby squawk.rb

If you want to run it in the background on startup, check back later. I’ll be posting on this shortly.