The first time I have heard of the name of Twitter was in 2008, when Barrack Obama mentioned its name several times in public speeches as part of the presidential campaign to reiterate that American people had retained exceptionally good innovation even under the least favorable economic circumstances.

Honestly, I was so intrigued and tried several times to find out what was so great about this website, but unfortunately I could not access this site because the Internet filtering system in China blocked us off such prevailing social websites for unknown reasons.

In the following months I learned that Twitter was a micro-blogging platform where people got to post instantaneous messages to a certain group of people. I was a little disappointed upon learning that and kept wondering what was the magic power that could help inhale hundreds of millions of netizens and even made Obama take it as a good cyber example of American spirit.

I found my skepticism toward Twitter well grounded when I for the first time got to actually use it. The registration was convenient and user interface friendly, and the suggested groups to follow did look interesting to me.

But only minutes after I finished all the steps and started to check other people out, I found most of the “twits” nothing spectacular but spammy. Why should I care if a total stranger was at the prom or taking a dump. All did not seem to make much sense to me.

Other than the meaningless nagging, there were cheesy advertisement too, all making Twitter as an annoying place as an Asian train station where you would get constantly disturbed by possible swindlers.

When I thought following industrial giants might be a good approach to keep up to their latest activities, I chose some respectable names in intelligent terminals, which business sector I was in, only to find chatty dialogues that I absolutely had no clue about.

There are some good features about Twitter though. One major reason that I think Twitter sucks and is useless is probably I do not have circles of friends using it.

If I was sharing the twits with some of my closest friends, it might be fun to keep track of what they were up to, either experiencing major life changes or coping with daily trivia. Maybe that is why weibo.com, an imitation of micro-blogging site developed by Sina, can also prevail in China.

Although later I found something worth following, mostly news agencies and television channels, Twitter is far less good than I expected. Since inviting friends to create my very own little circle on Twitter is not likely to happen for two reasons: first, it is still blocked off by the Internet filtering system and, second, people around me are already loyal users of weibo.com, the future of Twitter in China can be extremely bleak. And to be honest, Twitter is far from being anything revolutionary like StumbleUpon, even though it ranks higher on Alexa.

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