Ricky Gervais, creator of Britain's "The Office" and, more recently, star of "Ghost Town" and "The Invention of Lying" and host of the 2010 Golden Globe Awards, has quit Twitter after less than a month, calling it "pointless" and "undignified." That makes Gervais part of the nearly 60% of users who quit Twitter during their first month, and the latest in a string of high-profile celebrities to publicly announce their departure from the world's fastest-growing social network.

Gervais, who made only six tweets during the month he spent on Twitter (that's an average of just one tweet every five days), said the microblogging platform was "fun as a networking device for teenagers," but essentially "pointless" and "undignified" for adults - reflecting his lack of awareness of Twitter's user demographic, when slants dramatically older than most other social networks. Despite his dearth of tweets, Gervais had collected over 13,000 followers on Twitter before he disappointed and insulted them all by calling them immature and undignified.

The problem with Twitter that normal people talk about over and over again is that many Hollywood celebrities (with some notable exceptions) seem to think that Twitter is just a platform for getting more attention - not a place to have real-time, topical conversations with like-minded people. Gervais isn't wrong in his assessment about celebrities on Twitter - but he's just as much a part of the problem as most other celebrities. Since Mr. Gervais' six tweets amounted to nothing more than shameless self-promotion themselves, we're not really sorry to see him go - indeed, we weren't really planning or expecting on making "new virtual friends" with Gervais, since he rarely if ever replied to any tweets sent to him.

Gervais isn't the only Twitter Quitter to make a loud-mouthed departure from the microblogging platform in recent months. Indeed, it seems like no celebrity can stop using Twitter without issuing a press release or making a blog post, or in the case of Miley Cyrus, who quit Twitter in October, posting a big Youtube video where she said Twitter should be "banned from this universe." It's very brave and forward-thinking of Miley Cyrus to promote censorship not only for all the people of earth, but for all of the varied alien species throughout the cosmos who may or may not be tuning in to our tweets.

I suspect I speak for a lot of Twitter users when I say "good riddance." The vast majority of us use Twitter for a myriad of different reasons, except one - to listen to what a bunch of egotistical, self-important celebrities think. Although users like Ashton Kutcher and Oprah may have amassed millions of followers, their user-base is a drop in the bucket compared to the total number of Twitter users out there. Most people use Twitter to connect with real people - not to give Hollywood another way to tell us what we should think.

As Gervais said, he's not interested in being friends with real people - he's only interested in sending text messages to his friends about what he just ate. Maybe what celebrities like Gervais and Cyrus hate so much about Twitter is the fact that it gives normal people like you and me the opportunity to tell them what we really think about them - that we think what they have to say is "pointless" and "undignified."