Kanye West (somewhat) famously wrote in all caps, “EVERYTHING TWITTER OFFERS, I NEED LESS OF.” I was feeling some of that when his anti-Twitter outburst made news back in May.

Well, finally, we have something in common.

I’m over Twitter.

Last fall, I thought Twitter had a lot of potential, and maybe it does. But several months later, my Twitter gears are stripped. I followed the advice of the “social media experts” (who are these people, anyway?) and followed back everyone who followed me — to build stronger relationships, they said. Well, I soon learned that I shouldn’t follow everybody who follows me.

I had to get out the digital cleaver and start hacking away at all these followers. My first decision was to ignore people who didn’t speak English. Easy enough. Once the waves of Spammers started hitting me, I decided not to follow anyone who sold anything. The porn spam taught me not to follow anyone with a female name followed by three digits.

Eventually, I pared down the list to include only people in North Carolina. I then cut it down to people who may be viewers. I was still following about 270 people.

Recently, I had to stop following all but 11 of the people/entities I followed, because the signal-to-noise ratio was too high. I saw everything, but I saw nothing. Eventually, it all felt like Spam. Sometimes, Twitter would have valuable information — a link, details on a breaking news story, a funny observation. But because of it’s nature, the Twitter experience serves up so much junk, it’s hard to find the valuable stuff.

At first, I thought that maybe I don’t have a beef with Twitter itself. Maybe it’s the people who are the problem. It’s like blaming the radio for bad programming. But I think there is a big problem with Twitter as a medium: It is of the moment. You have to be there, actively participating, for it to work. It’s a big time-sucker. There’s no good way to tell who’s going to be an interesting Tweeter and who’s going to blah, blah all day. You have to sit down and really comb through a lot of material to find the diamonds. Of course, I suppose I could have all of this sent to my mobile device so I could sit around in restaurants and Tweet back and forth all the time, but no, thank you.

Now, every business is trying to get in on the fad, spending a lot of time and energy to staff Twitter. Sears is hiring someone to be their Twitter moderator. A full-time job! But is the return worth the effort? Nielsen says 60 percent of people who sign up for Twitter don’t return the following month. When I was slicing up my list of followers, I found that most of the real people on there (not the SEO marketing social media guru spam crap-buffet) Tweeted once or twice (“Here i am on twitter!”) a few months ago and that was it. I suppose it’s possible they still receive and consume my content, but I think it’s unlikely. Of the 40 percent of users who do come back, how many are seeing Tweets and responding?

I should point out that I’ve corresponded with interesting, intelligent, nice people on Twitter. I’ve enjoyed it overall. But I just don’t need Twitter. I think it’s telling that younger people are not into it. They use Facebook and texting — and what more do you really need to communicate electronically with the people you know?

I’d love to hear from anyone who wants to send me an e-mail or add me to Facebook, but I’m over Twitter.