Wednesday, February 10, 2010

I don't Twitter

I have a confession to make.

I don't Twitter. There I said it.

I'm not even sure if Twitter in this context (i.e. as a verb) should have a capital T but my iPhone spell check keeps changing it and I can't be bothered to argue.

I know you're probably aghast at that. I mean I practically live in the blogosphere. Have for years. (Apart from last year when I took a year off everything that wasn't baby-related. Apart from one of my own blogs. Which was baby-related.)

I'm a self-confessed Web 2.0 fan. Have been since it started. I just love the concept of social networking and the way the Internet brings people together who would otherwise never meet.

I use LinkedIn for work contacts and Facebook for social contacts. My family and many of my friends live overseas and I keep in touch with lots of them through Facebook. I think I've had more contact with my cousins in the past 18 months than I did for the previous 10 years thanks to Facebook.

But I don't Twitter.

Oh I've thought about it. When it first came out I thought "that's stupid and pointless. Why do I need that?" And it probably was stupid and pointless back then. Then I kept seeing references to it scattered about the Internet and I thought "two social networks is enough". I'd avoided mySpace. (I'm GenX. Tail end. The Y tail.) So surely I could avoid Twitter too.

Then I started seeing it mentioned on Facebook and wondered if maybe the two could complement one another. I asked my Facebook friends what they thought. Answers were mixed and I concluded I didn't need to Twitter. Or tweet.

So I left it again for a while. But then I started thinking about promoting this blog and whether to get it up there on Facebook and LinkedIn. And again Twitter entered my consciousness. And today I read a post from Penelope Trunk titled "Twitter can save your life".

Usually I would provide a link but I can't seem to find the original post. It's appearing in my Google Reader but the link back to her site doesn't work and I can't find it from her homepage. You'll just have to take my word for it. She talks about how Twitter isn't really all that stupid. She says that it helps you find like-minded people, gets you answers and information fast, and a few other things that sound a bit like she's scraping the barrel. (Perhaps she realised she was scraping the barrel and deleted the post from her site.)

Like-minded people and fast answers sound pretty good though. So I thought I might just check it out. Follow my favourite bloggers and give it a go for a while. Then I'll let you know whether it was worth it.

So I will. I'll Twitter. Soon.

Written with BlogPress Lite for iPhone.

10 comments:

  1. Nice job on the blog Lins.

    I generally tend to agree, however I have found one niche for twitter - providing people with quick updates made to a web site. So I've been using it with the PeopleSoft Wiki just to let people know what's been going on / updated. However, I guess you could argue that an RSS feed does the same thing?

    Another use for twitter that I don't mind is using it to provide quick status updates on a project that you think other people might be interested in - e.g. just letting people know how are you going with it.

    You can also use it as a public-goal tracking tool; here's what I'm trying to do and here's how I'm going. Again though, similar to a blog but simpler...

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