Devon Biere’s Blog

This week, I finally started using Twitter (@devdog).  I am a longtime Twitter skeptic but I’m forcing myself to give it a shot.  I need to see where it fits in for me, given that I already use LinkedIn for professional networking, Facebook for personal stuff, and this blog for general musings.

As I was checking out the Twitterverse, it occurred to me that I had seen this format before.  The ellipses… the inane comments… the name-dropping… the self-indulgence… it’s the freaking Larry King column from USA Today back in the 90’s, brought back to life!  Apparently, Billy Crystal made a similar observation on Leno recently.  It’s absolutely true.  In fact, Larry King is on Twitter (@kingsthings) and he hasn’t missed a beat.  Here are a few recent excerpts, reformatted in the style of his old column:

I just finished taping Tavis Smiley’s show. it airs tomorrow night - he might just be the best in the business…  I am picking Dunkirk for the Belmont Stakes. I picked him for the Derby & he didn’t win & he didn’t run Preakness but I am sticking with him…  The remake of the Taking of Pelham 1,2,3 is a topnotch thriller. The best is years… Denzel Washington & John Travolta are superb…  Come see me in Vegas… They never get the credit they deserve, but jockeys are the best athletes in all of sports…  I have over 200 pair of suspenders… had breakfast with Tommy Lasorda at Dodger Stadium today…

OK, you say, that’s just Larry being Larry.  Carrying on in the inimitable style that was parodied so perfectly and mercilessly by The Onion many years ago (”Five minutes with Walter Matthau is like 10 years in an Ivy League school….  If I could be any nationality in the world, I’d be Flemish….”).

I don’t think so.  Here are some Larry-formatted tweets from a fairly diverse set of Twitter accounts.  I’m not picking on anyone, just having some fun to prove the point:

Exhibit A:

What’s happening in Vancouver this weekend? I’ve been looking for an excuse to travel up there this year… Here’s the scoop on Black Oak Books. It’s still operating on the web…  Truth: I had a pain in my stomach like being punched when I saw @om and @rww on the SUL…  Happy birthday to Howard Dean’s campaign guy –> @JoeTrippi… Oh Yoko, great John Lennon song, also in the movie Rushmore…

Exhibit B:

With the kids reading Shel Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree”. He was amazing. “Where The Sidewalk Ends” was my fav as a kid… Dinner with the family. Got pizza delivered… Peter Frampton on sat radio. Classic… Frost Nixon was amazing… I just had a double cheeseburger, fries, and 2 scoops of ice cream… Also, what’s up with these cords/strings they always have in Euro bathrooms?

Exhibit C:

In mexico city for the first time. Buenos dias… just finished watching the lakers game. it got a little tense there for a while. but 2-0 feels very nice… I loved Pan’s Labyrinth, by the way… i miss lauryn & d’angelo… that’s the thing about conspiracy theories. u can speculate about sinister intentions all u want, but seldom do people offer any proof… Happy Birthday Vaughn Anthony…

Exhibit D:

Hanging with Dave & Laura, my friends from high school. I hadn’t seen Laura in 23 years… Time for a pedicure… Today is Arlo’s last day at the Montessori School! End of an era… I swear I just saw 1970s Castro driving a Jeep… IKEA’s 80s music mix is better than everyone else’s 80s mix… We saw UP today and we liked it too… Zombies are the new Pirates…

If those aren’t Larry King columns, I don’t know what they are.

By the way, Exhibit A is Dave Winer (@davewiner).  Exhibit B is Lance Armstrong (@lancearmstrong).  Exhibit C is John Legend (@johnlegend).  Exhibit D is Jennifer Robbins (@jenville).  All good people with good content, using Twitter exactly as intended.  I think it’s really just the format itself that brings out our inner Larry King.

Going beyond Twitter, how is the typical blog all that different from Andy Rooney’s commentaries on 60 Minutes?  Random topics, rambling prose, fixations on minutiae, cranky commentaries, sentimentalism.  Hell, I could imagine him doing a variant of this very post!

“What’s the deal with Twitter?  I mean, 140 characters, including spaces?  And punctuation?  I wonder who came up with that.  Can’t we get the spaces for free at least?  Ever notice how big the space bar is?  I sure have.”

Larry King is 75 years old.  Andy Rooney is 90.

I think it’s funny that all our trendy, modern social networking and digital self-expression tools have somehow made us all sound like a bunch of curmudgeonly commentators.