If you haven’t heard by now, or have simply been hiding under a rock, you might not know that Twitter is rapidly growing and expanding.

Twitter is a sort of micro-blog that allows people to sign up for free, then post what they call “tweets”: little informational snippets about anything, consisting of 140 characters or less.

Think of it as Facebook status updates genetically altered and given fresh steroid injections daily.

I was a Twitter user for awhile and I did see some value in it. For me, blog traffic increased just a bit as new people would follow me and want to find out more about me. I did meet a couple people on there (albeit, not face-to-face).

I also saw value in it from the standpoint of companies and news organizations. My employer has a Twitter account and uses it to post links to News-Leader.com. KSPR, KY3 and many other media outlets have done the same.

As for just normal people like you and me, though, I think it’s a bit much.

Never mind the fact that people posted severely inane updates to it…I mean, really, do I need to know EXACTLY where someone is at a given moment or what they’re eating? No!

The very irksome thing about Twitter is that it has seeped onto Facebook and allowed people’s tweets to become part of their status feed. There is nothing I hate worse than logging onto Facebook and seeing a long line of messages consisting of at signs and hash symbols, with poorly spelled words simply to fit the 140-character requirement.

I cancelled my Twitter account nearly a week ago and I don’t really miss it. I don’t need to tell people my life every 15 minutes in 140 characters or less. In fact, this blog doesn’t have a character restriction and I’ve been typing on this thing for four years, thanks.

If you really want to dig deep, think of it this way. Twitter is an indication of how good we are as a society at virtually networking from behind a computer screen, and how horrible we are at actual face-to-face interaction. It’s very easy to communicate with people on the Internet — if you don’t like what they have to offer you can simply delete them as a friend on Facebook or Twitter with no repercussions. Personal relationships and their intricacies are a whole different story, and people’s over-reliance on technology to replace those relationships — especially in the younger generation — is nothing short of frightening.

What Twitter, and now even the Twitterization of Facebook with the recent revamp, say to me is that many people’s lives are just so normal and uneventful that they have to try to find a way to make other people think that’s not the case. Case in point, posting a tweet about sitting there making coffee and expecting everyone to look at it. What’s the point, and why should I care that you’re doing what you’re doing?

I am all for networking with people, but there comes a point when our desire to be accepted, part of a community, and just given attention of any sort becomes overkill, and Twitter is a prime example of that.

That’s why I got rid of Twitter.