Yeah, uhm, about Twitter…
Look, I love it. I’ve met more awesome people (and let’s face it, they’ve met ME :p) via that goofy little chat thingie than I could possibly have expected, much less hoped.
But it’s no place for a reasonable conversation. Hey, I’m twitchy enough as it is.
What’s mildly entertaining is how long it’s taken me to realize that. It’s obvious enough at first blush, but the whole instant gratification of it is sneakily seductive.
It reminds me in that bizarre tangental way things remind me of things, of having been a member of Social Circles in the early 2ks. After the first few months, I started seeing the patterns of events and the fact that they’d had two a day was far less interesting. The turnover of members was interesting also. I remember hanging out with a core crew (well, two of them really) and I’d go to their happy hour events and wonder where the couple few new cool people from the previous month had gone.
Finally I realized what was happening. People were joining SC, doing a bunch of stuff, meeting people and they were clustering up and leaving. After all it was a multi-thousand dollar a year expense (ah, the good old days) so people were just going to the well, filling their bucket, and leaving.
And I’m starting to see a similar but different phenomenon with twitter. yeah, I’m in the stream most of most days because that’s what life is like now (it’s cheap and mildly social) but over the past week I’ve been trying to have reasonable protracted conversations with a couple/few people and using 140 character increments with polling lag was just brutal.
The evolution of my participation in the forum is really quite something over the last month.
Ah well, onward and upward I suppose.
Tags: Twitter
November 25th, 2009 at 12:53 am
While there are a few people that I pretty much NEED to talk with outside of twitter (because lets face it, Sarah and I could NEVER have a regular convo using 140 characters…could you imagine?), I do like the fact that sometimes I only have very little room to say what I need to say, and when I need to make my point perfectly clear, the more concise the better. “Back off bucko” is a lot more straight forward that an email that ends up taking me 4 hours to write because I have more time to think and worry and try not to hurt someone’s feelings and ends up not expressing my extreme desire to kick someone in the teeth, ya know?
But on the other hand, I find that when I talk to people outside of twitter I also spend less time on twitter interacting with other people. Like this past week, perfect example. Spent a lot of time emailing/IM’ing and texting, and a lot less time on twitter. (a way to break the addiction perhaps?)
All THAT said, there are also certain topics that just should not be discussed on twitter. (yeah, this coming from the girl who tweets anything that falls out of my brain) But I just cannot wrap my head around the people who literally tweet every single detail of their life, relationships, bodily functions, etc. Of course, those are the same people who post under some made up name and ridiculous avatar.
Ok I’m done here. I will just talk to you later, I just realized that this took forever to write up and it wasn’t supposed to. LOL ;-)