I had one of those flashy moments of epiphany yesterday. I wanted to find out what was going on at the Frankfurt Book Fair and saw on Twitter a link to Twitterfall with the hashtag (is that the right word?) for tweets from everyone there. Like an idiot I clicked on it.

Twitterfall was right. Every last note and dribble of tweeted info was coming out of Frankfurt at the rate of a message or more per second. You know the kind of thing...
<blockquote>Oo. That's Peter Mayer in a lift.

I have a stinking hangover.

Off for some drinks to get a hangover.

Cory Doctorow says publishers are pirates

My head hurts but that girl from Random House has big boobies</blockquote>
What is all this crap and why on earth are we expected to spend time on it?

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The epiphany that popped up at that moment was this (and excuse me if you think it falls into the category of what Basil Fawlty one called the 'A-level bleeding obvious'). Twitter is, for the most part, a complete waste of time. It doesn't work as a communications tool <em>at all</em>. So many people are tweeting that the chances of anyone but a handful of people seeing that 140 characters of yours or less are remote in the extreme. By the time they get round to looking at Twitter several hundred other tweets will have taken its place, pushing it to the bottom of the queue and off their page.

The answer, so some Twitter chums tell me, is to tweet the same thing at regular intervals so that everyone around the world, in whatever time zone, gets the message in the end. But this is insane. <em>The problem is there's too much stuff out there already.</em> You don't fix it by quadrupling or sextupling the amount of information people can't cope with already.

Ah, said someone else. You don't get it. Twitter isn't a communication tool any more. It's about news. No it isn't. Yesterday there was a lot of hooha about the Carter-Ruck injunction against the Guardian which stopped the newspaper reporting a simple Parliamentary question. This was a scandal. The newspapers were injuncted against saying much about it for a while. So Twitter took its place -- and I happily joined in, decrying the whole thing, screaming for people's heads. But whose?

Try as you might nowhere on Twitter did anyone actually hand out much in the way of information about what was going on. Yes, some tweets did point you to a few blog posts that explained the background. But most people just took part in some mad Twitter angerfest based upon plain ignorance. Democracy was threatened. The twitterverse was coming to the rescue. Sanity was restored and it was thanks to the tweets, not the expensive lawyers the Guardian had on the case.

Sorry to disillusion anyone out there but this just wasn't the case. Being told by Stephen Fry that something is a scandal, without any explanation or background, may be an ooh-ah moment in terms of the power of the Internet but it does not add to the great sum of human knowledge or make the world more democratic in the slightest. The Carter-Ruck furore yesterday was, for the most part, as well-informed and full of wit and informed discourse as the crowd at a football match.

Twitter is an OK, quick and free way of getting out a message to a small number of people who may be following you and happen to see your tweet in the brief space of time it stays in front of them. I'll continue to use it for that purpose, though not as much as I have been doing because frankly it's a distraction, and one that doesn't repay the time it demands. Nor does Facebook, though that's a different story.

It scares the life out of me that some professionals in publishing, particularly in the US, think, as one of them put it to me not long ago, 'social media is the new marketing'. If that's true God help us all. One tweet is just a small shriek in a very busy crowd, lost for the most part in all the other clamour. I'll tweet this once, this morning, for the benefit of those close to Greenwich Mean Time. Then once again this afternoon for those on the other side of the Atlantic. But two identical tweets a day is the most I feel anyone should put out there.

Oh, and don't even get me started on the companies who are now using Twitter as a form of so-called 'customer service'. Over the past year tweeted complaints have resulted in tardy responses from tweetstaff from BT, Easyjet and Boingo to name a few. None of them did anything that someone over the phone couldn't have done, and probably more quickly. Most, to be honest, simply waited for the problem to go away then say, 'Glad things are sorted now.' Why are companies paying people to do this kind of thing? Wouldn't they be better off spending the resources on their products instead of paying people to tweet pointless sympathy at customers they fail in the field?

Perhaps the most annoying thing of all though is this: somewhere in the churning ocean of dross there are things I'd like to know, thoughts I'd like to hear, opinions I want to read. Unfortunately it's so damned hard to find them I'm going to give up before I try. To use the vernacular of the medium: Twitter FAIL.