Twits

It's hard for me to explain why viewing people's Facebook updates can be so annoying. There's just something that gets under my skin when people post updates and are begging for some kind of validating response. I'm all for validation, but there's something about the post that tacitly pleads for it without actually pleading for it that I just can't stand.

A made-up example: "Woke up this morning to beautiful weather and went for a run on the beach. Sitting down now with a huge mug of coffee and the NYT crossword." What this person wants is for someone to comment on the status saying something like "Mmmmm, sounds perfect!" or "I'm so jealous -- that's my IDEAL morning."

I'm not sure what is more irritating though -- the egomaniacs who post every time they nail their hyper-productive Sunday morning routine, or the poor souls who play into the egomania. I'd rather people just post the following: "Woke up this morning earlier than you did and I went for a run. I'm very proud of myself, not only because I have the willpower to wake up early, but because I'm in great shape. I'm also intellectual and love doing the Times crossword puzzle. But I'm one of the people at the same time, so I DO need my coffee fix! Please feel free to praise me, and get ready for my next personal achievement to be posted."

Rant over.

Now, I'm not much of a Twitter user, but since Tweets are similar to Facebook updates, I'm sure that there's tons of overlap in how annoying Tweets can be. So I was really thrilled to see this new site: www.tweetingtoohard.com. Please check it out. They publicly list Tweets where people are "Tweeting too hard." A few examples:

nice compliment from Sting's voice coach to me "You're like him, you have a lot of internal awareness, know things." (I can rock that...:)

this morning i passed what i thought was a calvin klein ad, but it was just a mirror...how WEIRD!

We WALKED to the grocery store this morning. We are ADORABLE. And green.

and

I gave my cleaning lady a raise today, even though she didn't ask, as my own little contribution to fighting the recession.

Name-dropping. Activity-dropping. Praise-fishing. All of these are exposed at Tweetingtoohard.com. Finally, one of the most annoying and difficult to describe pet peeves of the Web 2.0 era is being exposed.