Bitter on Twitter

We twitter, or tweeter, or twatter, or whatever you want to call it. We're @crackstaff if you're interested, although we don't do much more than pimp our columns (our lack of motivation knows few boundaries).

From our relatively short time on Twitter, we have found it full of new-age cheats, frauds and charlatans, an unprecedented collection of unrepentant hucksters whose sheer number and audacity would bring tears to the eyes of H.L Mencken (perhaps tears of joy for all the column inches he could wring out of them, though a modern-day Mencken would have probably already taken the layoff shiv in the back from The Sun).

We remember fondly the days in the late 1990s when any bozo could roll out a sure-to-fail plan and still extract enough money from a foolish venture capitalist to keep a small office in Post-It notes, pastries and Friday keg socials for a few months, until reality came rudely calling. (Well, almost any bozo. We were still typing on an IBM Selectric at the time. This whole Internet thing has never come easy for us.)

Those people at least had to break a sweat to be fraudulent. They had to have some sort of idea — online dog food warehouse, whatever — to steal cash. Today's Twitter hucksters just position themselves as gurus, able to impart to the magical knowledge of social networking in 140 characters or less to any business that can pay them. They don't even have to come up with a crappy plan. Businesses, not knowing any better, hopelessly desperate not to be left behind, ante up.

But don't think we're running from Twitter faster than ESPN from a Ben Roethlisberger civil suit. We're there. We're in. We're typing. We'll never be smart enough (or patently dishonest enough) to label ourselves a guru, but we promise to be smart enough to always laugh at those who do.