Is it me or is Twitter a little distracting and borderline annoying? I realize to keep up with the times – and particularly as Twitter is enjoying its tipping point – I am almost obligated to have a feed. I’m using Twitterific on my desktop and Twitterfon on my iPhone, which are both decent little apps. But that $*#&%$-ing bird on my desktop turns blue (indicating new activity) nearly every minute and I’m following less than 50 people.

So I check and 85% of the tweets are, well, not really worth the investigation. Another 5% are Tinyurl links to articles or blog posts or whatever. These are admittedly more useful. However, they’re not really urgent matters and so perhaps would’ve been better sent as emails which I can more easily go back through, organize into smart mailboxes, etc. etc.

Even the Tweets that entertain me, to which I reply back, are more distractions than anything. I break my train of thought on a matter I’m being paid to think about so I can comment on a friend’s quirky note – and the value of that is what?

Ultimately it feels like we’re all volunteering to SPAM each other. We’re signing up to increase our own A.D.D. And ironically, we’re volunteering to be broadcast at in a media that as supposed to be all about pulling information when we wanted it.

I’m sure this is all of great utility for people who fit the ‘jury duty volunteer profile’(i.e. students, unemployed, retirees, etc. with nothing else to do). And I’m sure my comrades in the self-infatuated geekosphere remain convinced this is the going create a global, feel-good, Utopian,  kum-ba-yah where everyone benefits for 24-7-365 connectivity with all the glorious information flitting about.

I’m calling B.S. here.

Most of the information tweeted  delivers no value  other than to distract me from doing something that could provide value. We’re training ourselves to defocus and frankly I think it will not serve us well.

A second point is, if <50 people are hard to keep up with on Twitter without simply staring at the feed all the time, isn’t following hundreds sort of pointless? I mean really, how many people’s posts do we see? How can we sort out the useless from the useful? Aren’t we just transferring the old-media problem of too much noise, to a new medium where the noise producers are us?

Web 2.0 is falling prey to the same problems of Web 1.0. Poor filtration. There’s no shortage of information (and noise) but rather than making it easier to filter out, we all VOLUNTEER to make it harder by following every hiccup, potty break and daydream of hundreds of people to interrupt us all the time. We use things like Tweetdeck for ‘a simple, fast way to experience [the deluge of banality that is - editors note] Twitter.’In fact Tweetdeck just keeps a bigger CNN ticker of useless crap in view all the time distracting me from what I am trying to do.

My prediction is that Twitter will run like SecondLife. It will have a tipping point then a drop off as thousands of new accounts hastily set up to find out what all the hype is about become dormant when people realize this is not adding much to their lives.

If it doesn’t and we all do immerse ourselves in a constant stream of distracting banal information then the Information Age once celebrated for making us all more productive, smarter, efficient, etc. will have ironically set us back in that regard.

But we may not care, because rather than invent something new or solve some problem or spend time in the company of friends and family, we can check in on one of our 6,587 best friends’latest tweets about the terrific sandwich he just ate.