Earlier this week a San Jose Mercury article mentioned how CalTrain riders were using Twitter to get updates on train service or lack thereof. I’ve found this to be one huge, useful purpose for Twitter – getting information on something happening right now.

I’ve commuted via CalTrain for years now, and have found the staff to be very cagey about delays. There must be some staff policy to withhold information from riders as to the reasons for delays. So if a train is late, you don’t know why, and nobody will say how long it will be until the next train.

Even worse is the craptastic situation of being on a train that is delayed. You can literally be stuck on the tracks with no way to get off and no clue when you’re going to start moving again. I’ve been locked on a train that is MIA for literally, hours.

Well, Twitter on the iPhone is the solution to this lame situation. Now, when there’s a delay, you can search Twitter for “CalTrain” and odds are high there will be someone tweeting “CalTrain hit a car in Redwood City.” Knowledge is power. Then entertain yourself with iPhone Doodle Jump.

I love Twitter for this ability to search for stuff happening right now.

But I also hate Twitter for the exact same reason.

Here’s why: This morning this website was down. It’s hosted by Site5. The Site5 server status page was down as well. With no way to find out what was going on in the usual manner, I did a search on Twitter for Site5. Boom, all sorts of people complaining about the site being down, including Site5 themselves saying it was a DNS issue and would be fixed within 15 minutes.

I love Twitter.

But then, seconds later, I received several direct messages “@” messages telling me to check out some top ten web hosting resources. Spam. The exact same line and the exact same URL. Moderately helpful the first time, annoying the second, and spammy the third.

Obviously, spammers have invaded Twitter. And they are searching for keywords to find people to spam. My use of the word “hosting” invited direct messages from these idiots.

I hate Twitter.

If I want to know about great places for “hosting” I’ll do a search for “hosting” myself on Twitter, thank you very much. Searching for a reason for a server being down and looking for new hosting is related but not the same thing.

I invite all spammy Twitter users to board the next CalTrain that breaks down at Hayward Park, so you can sit on the tracks for three hours and ponder hard, the pain you inflict on a daily basis with your annoying, craptastic tweets. And no Doodle Jump for you.

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