I talked about what it would take for me to leave Twitter a couple of years ago, but never followed up when I did leave around a year later. So here we go.

I didn’t quit in one go. I stopped posting. I checked in on my feed less frequently. I switched my account to private. I didn’t go cold turkey, I simply found fewer reasons to return.

I’d like to say that I was high minded and principled, that I quit because of Musk and Nazis and hateful content. But the truth is that the people I followed and blocked meant that my feed was mostly hate-free, an odd mixture of geeky stuff and dad jokes. Though I did leave because of the people and the content.

A few years ago I had a job where every new recruit would go through a long process of shock and gradual acclimatisation to the main software product.

What it did doesn’t matter as much as how it was built: it was an application developed on top of a proprietary programming language and user interface designer. The reaction was always the same. Why? Why?! Why would you reinvent Visual Basic on Unix? Why would you inflict a programming language even worse than Basic on developers?¹

Sometimes it’s only when you start writing about a subject that you truly understand your opinion. That’s the approach I’m taking to answering the question: are you going to leave Twitter?

A few people have asked me in the last couple of months and the only response I have is that I’m not jumping ship and closing my account immediately.

But as the weeks have progressed, as I’ve written this piece, my thinking has evolved. It’s not that I’m going to immediately close my account but I can see The End approaching. Indeed, my usage of Twitter has dropped considerably.

• http://j.mp/y4VgND – For those that are interested: this is kind of technology I use in my day job. Tens of millions of records per day… http://t.co/ebMpRB7w
• http://testflightapp.com – @ellenich http://t.co/cTkoDDuE
• http://instagr.am/p/H66l8hyQmV/ – Groovy. http://t.co/DcuOQldA
• http://lanyrd.com/2012/lidg37/ – Hopefully making it to my first London iOS Developer Group meeting of the year tonight. http://t.co/NbKIMnTT #lidg

• http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-03-06/ – “Our lawyer has instructed me not to listen to your product idea.” http://t.co/jDWArMa6
• http://www.etsy.com/listing/91617431/upcycled-apple-computer-pet-bed?ref=cat_gallery_10 – Heh, for @krider2010 and @shabba1973. “@CMoz: Niiiice http://t.co/Tm2wIvmT Cat & mac lovers will love this!! :D”
• ZX81.org.uk – Photography, opinions and other random ramblings by Stephen Darlington – I’m moving zx81.org.uk to a new server, so if things are a little glitchy there for a while, that’s why.

• http://yfrog.com/nxqygvp – Thanks Xcode, very helpful. http://t.co/sYay95eo
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLfghLQE3F4 – Re. the privatisation of the Police… Fry and Laurie got there first in the eighties… http://t.co/VmYwnb20
• http://m.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/01/hitchens-201201 – @pdparticle Not necessarily. http://t.co/wnaNlFaj
• http://www.macworld.com/article/165587/2012/02/yahoo_facebook_in_intellectual_property_dispute.html#lsrc.rss_main – I guess this means that Yahoo! are officially on their way out. If you can’t compete, sue over vague IP rights. http://t.co/jCcILiUS
• http://instagr.am/p/HtVldeyQoU/ – Donkeys of Greece calendar: March 2012 http://t.co/UQe7wGzO
• http://bit.ly/ycpIfz – Unite Leader calls for competency on ‘a day of actual action’ http://t.co/OdrDQDjL
• http://geekpanic.com/post/18376086580/the-2-0-paradox – Interesting post on “The 2.0-paradox.” Thinking through this exact problem now. http://t.co/cqLqd2Ni
• http://pinboard.in/talks/biz.pdf – Interesting talk by the founder of @Pinboard. http://t.co/UwAHIHP6 [PDF]
• http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Scoopertino/~3/ntGLHzoJc6U/ – Apple takes the wraps off OS X Cowardly Lion http://t.co/9wM2DYVt
• http://j.mp/wW9h2u – “Apple’s share value hit an unprecedented $500bn… this morning, making the company worth more than Poland.” http://t.co/lkNP7zFY
• Cycling from the Czech Republic to Germany – I’ve updated all the images on my Prague to Meißen cycling trip blog. I’m better with Aperture than I used to be… It was a good trip; can’t believe it was in 2008!
• Rant: I Love Photography – Well said. Plus some great pictures!

• Average App Store Review Times – Displays the average app review time by pattern-matching tweets. Clever. (Currently around seven days, apparently.)
• Osborne! – Nice article about the Osborne-1 and the man behind it.

• Twitter tells third-party devs to stop making Twitter client apps – “More significantly, it demonstrates the vulnerability of building a business on top of a Web platform that is controlled by a single vendor.” This is exactly the lesson I found with my Delicious.com client.
• Illinois scrubs death penalty – Another step in the right direction.
• NYT and “torture”: Searching for a justification – Apparently the definition of torture depends very much on who is doing it.

• Deliberately uninformed, relentlessly so [a rant] – “Many people in the United States purchase one or fewer books every year. Many of those people have seen every single episode of American Idol. There is clearly a correlation here.” Wholeheartedly agree with this post. Not knowing stuff is fine. Being proud of not knowing stuff? Not so much.
• Twitter Can Predict the Stock Market – “Mao compared the national mood to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. She found that one emotion, calmness, lined up surprisingly well with the rises and falls of the stock market — but three or four days in advance.”

• Catholics, it’s you this Pope has abused – Why even Catholics should Protest The Pope.
• There’s more to colour than meets the eye – Nice discussion of colours and what they “mean.”
• Compromising Twitter’s OAuth security system – " What it comes down to is that OAuth 1.0a is a horrible solution to a very difficult problem. It works acceptably well for server-to-server authentication, but there are far too many unresolved issues in the current specification for it to be used as-is on a widespread basis for desktop applications. It’s simply not mature enough yet." This is pretty much what I found implementing OAuth for Yahoo! in Yummy.