At the risk of correctly being called a hypocrite for writing about something I’m very sick of hearing other people write about I’m checking in to say I am nauseated by the length, breadth, and depth of Twitter coverage, especially by those that are obsessed with the dry issue of why Twitter appears to have failed to properly scale up the service to meet the growing demand.

Although it’s OK (and important) for Twitter to write about Twitter, I fear this is the beginning of more, and more, and more Techmeme coverage in what is a perfect example of how the Technology echo chamber is at risk of becoming a real intellectual liability for those of us who believe that the powerful and most interesting aspects of a technology like Twitter are not how it relates to the global technology infrastructure, but how it connects people in new, more effective, more entertaining, more profitable, or just different ways.

Hey people - they’ll scale Twitter up very soon, OK?

Twitter is now a major player, valued at about $100,000,000 after the recent $15 million+ VC investments. Twitter will now be investing in the appropriate level of hardware and services to become the robust mainstream platform techies have been too-loudly bitching about for several months. They didn’t do that before because it’s expensive to scale up as they needed to do, and they were probably and reasonable averse to going deep in the hole while they still make little to no revenue.

This was a reasonable and predictable course of action that only made more than a passing difference to a handful of obsessive users of the service who, frankly, appear to be exaggerating the importance of Twitter because it’s very appealing to hardcore online technology folks in a way it will not be appealing to mainstream folks.

When can we take just a moment to talk about the far more important issues around Twitter - namely will anybody care about it outside of the world’s tech centers, where onliners who have 24/7 technological connectivity now also want 24/7 social connectivity. The answer, in a word, is … NO. Twitter will remain an application that appeals to an influential group of technologists and technology followers, but it will fail to break into widespread mainstream use.

As a fan and friend of Twitter and many who also use this important messaging/microblogging service I recognize that Twitter is a lot of fun and helpful in terms of connecting people who *both* use it, especially in a conference venue when it is very helpful to be able to broadcast a note to hundreds of friends in real time saying, for example “party in room 327!”. However it’s also a huge time sink - you can sit voyeuristically and watch tech’s best and brightest folks bump, grind, and grumble about all sorts of things, and you can even jump into the conversation yourself. I’ve found that as the number of people you follow gets above about 200 Twitter’s appeal starts to break down unless you put in more time than most people want to put in to manage “favorites” or tweak other things so you only see the people you are most interested in following.

Sorry for the hypocrisy of ranting about writing about Twitter, but I could not help my self, and it may happen again. If it does, feel free to change the channel, or better yet leave a scathing critical comment … over at Twitter.