Here’s a good article, written by Farhad Manjoo. The slug says it all: twitter-to-save-itself-must-scale-back-world-swallowing-ambitions.

“Maybe Twitter is not meant to be the most popular band in the world,” said Anil Dash, a longtime user of Twitter and the chief executive of ThinkUp, a start-up that intends to improve how people use social networks. “Maybe it’s meant to be merely Pearl Jam and not U2, and maybe Twitter could find equilibrium as a company with an enterprise value of merely $5 billion.”

Wall Street has condemning Twitter as a failure is sort of perverse given that it has ~300M users and $500M quarterly revenue.

Anyway, what recently struck me about Twitter was not its prospects for the future, but just how much some people use it. I was drinking a beer overlooking the Zócalo and felt a sudden compulsion to multiply and divide. Farhad Manjoo has 81.1k tweets in 9 years. That’s about 25 tweets a day. Assuming it takes him 5 minutes to cook up and write a tweet, for the last decade he’s spent 15% of his waking life just sending tweets.

Not that that’s necessarily bad, as my title would suggest. Maybe tweets are haiku for the 21st century, and the most obsessive tweeters are digital Zen poets.