Today I joined Twitter. You can find me at RRRJessica.
I don’t know what to make of it, honestly.
It does meet two desires I didn’t know I had (isn’t that what technology does in a capitalist economy? Create new needs it can expensively fill?):
1. You feel like there’s constant fun-seeming activity, even when no one is visiting your blog, or posting new blog posts, which is nice. It makes me wonder whether I hear a sucking sound in Romanceland, or is it just sucking away the fat (see #2)?
2. You feel like you can post the inane personal things you sometimes want to post on your blog but know no one is interested in.
Most people on Twitter aren’t interested either, but there seem to be no conventions: there’s no desired level of discourse, no need to worry about the worth of what you write. You don’t announce your arrival or bid anyone adieu. You can ignore Tweets. It’s very freeing in a sense, like a Tower of Babel we construct tweet by tweet.
Like Myspace and Facebook, there are also ways to measure popularity and status. It looks to me like having more followers than people followed is the main measure, and it more or less replicates popularity in the blogophere, which you can also measure by “who travels to whom”. So, for example, Jane at Dear Author follows 27 but has 445 followers, while Smartbitch Sarah follows a mere 10, but has 1112 followers. Me, on the other hand: I follow 24 and have 10 followers, and those proportions will likely only get worse as I add more people to follow.
Some romance bloggers have restricted accounts and I can only shudder to think what calamities await me on Twitter that might make me decide to do that.
There are several people I have not found on Twitter who should be there if your local stodgy aged professor (as opposed to the hip professor represented by Dr. Frantz) is doing it. I won’t name names but you know who you are.
Most other romance bloggers have some authors on their followed lists, and I haven’t done that yet. I am not sure why.
Anyway, this was just a record of my initial impressions after one half day of it. Do you Twitter? Why or why not?
LOL Jessica hon, do you always over think things? It is cute.
Twitter is a time suck.
I wouldn’t touch myspace if you paid me.
Facebook is something I had someone else sign me up for that my blog and twitter feed into… everything else eh, if it amuses me it amuses me, if not it isn’t worth the time. But I am easy that way.
Have fun and if you don’t, don’t twitter, easy as that.
Sybil wrote:
Sybil. I am a philosopher. Literally. There is no such thing as the “over think” in my world!
I am enjoying Twitter!
I can barely keep up with my blog feed reader and I feel as though I already have too many passwords to remember for various sites, so I have no plans at all to start twittering.
And yes, I’m sure there are lots of other people, who are far busier than I am, who manage to twitter, blog, read, work, and spend time with their families and friends, but I know my limitations.
Laura Vivanco wrote:
You’ve dashed my hopes! You were one of the five people I most hoped would start doing it!
It’s no accident that I am one day away from two weeks off, and already feeling like I am on vacation. We’ll see how it goes when work begins again in eanest.
@ Jessica:
THAT explains it
Twitter can be a major addiction, but after awhile it will lose some steam. I only go on my My Space once a week and check Facebook once a day if I get messages or want to post links from my blog.
Um, thanks?! Glad to see you on Twitter. I love it. Communication and community without too much thinking!
I’m helping you balance your “following” and “followers” numbers. I just followed you back!
I started Twittering last July so that I could make small comments about what books I was reading at the time… and post my tweets on my blog sidebar. But then I got caught up in the social part of twittering… and it got a bit time consuming and unnecessarily excessive, you know? Now I barely twitter and sometimes miss the camaraderie of my romance reading twittering friends. Maybe I’ll go back to just twittering about books again…
Have fun!
@ Sarah Frantz:
I mean it, to me you are cutting edge.
@ Christine:
It is all about the balance isn’t it? Aristotle was so right.
@Katiebabs:
I will take your word on it!
I’m on Twitter though my updates are protected as they occasionally grumble in general terms about marking or touch on details about my children — subjects which I feel better not leaving 100% in the open.
I enjoy using the TwitterFox Add-On to keep track of new updates posted by my friends. Since I’ve had it installed, I also update more frequently (with 100% more inanity involved).
“You’ve dashed my hopes! You were one of the five people I most hoped would start doing it!”
I’m very flattered that you’d want to read the “inane personal things [I] sometimes want to post on [my] blog but know no one is interested in,” and/or that you’d want me to read your inane personal things, but since I’ve never felt an urge to post that kind of thing to TMT I really doubt I would feel a need to twitter about them, even if I did go on twitter. And if I wanted to rant about something, I wouldn’t be able to twitter it, because of the word limit. I write very long rants. I would also feel obliged to edit them thoroughly and add footnotes before I set them loose in the wild, and by that stage they would have become blog posts.
Laura Vivanco wrote:
But nothing is truly inane between friends!
Janice wrote:
Hmmmm… yet another thing to check out!
Um, thank you again?! That just boggles my mind, that anyone would consider me that way, but I guess it’s a good thing!
But nothing is truly inane between friends!
That’s almost certainly true, particularly if the friends (a) believe that the personal is/can be political and (b) have an immense capacity to “over think” things.
Talking about the inane being deeply political, have you seen this recent news item:
“Future generations are going to look at the way we make toilet paper as one of the greatest excesses of our age. Making toilet paper from virgin wood is a lot worse than driving Hummers in terms of global warming pollution.” Making toilet paper has a significant impact because of chemicals used in pulp manufacture and cutting down forests.
A campaign by Greenpeace seeks to raise consciousness among Americans about the environmental costs of their toilet habits and counter an aggressive new push by the paper industry giants to market so-called luxury brands.
More than 98% of the toilet roll sold in America comes from virgin forests, said Hershkowitz. In Europe and Latin America, up to 40% of toilet paper comes from recycled products. [...]
Those brands, which put quilting and pockets of air between several layers of paper, are especially damaging to the environment. (The Guardian)
I hear that sucking sound too…
I have no plans to Twitter. I’m rarely online at the same time as the people I suspect I would want to follow and anyway, I feel overwhelmed as it is.
I twitter (here: http://twitter.com/victoriajanssen), usually during the day. I mostly follow “real life” friends, authors or otherwise, and some authors I know from online.
I use it for casual chatting and for announcing new blog posts and the like. And keeping track of one of my local friends who travels a lot.
Tumperkin wrote:
That’s what I said 36 hours ago.
Victoria Janssen wrote:
Yes, I now see that you can use it to promote your blog. Previously, I had thought people used their blogs to promote their Twitter, which made no sense.
I’m on Twitter – which um, you already know since I see you’re following me now. I’ve been a terrible Tweet lately and have not been feeding my social network. I got busy, and well….started neglecting it. I really need to log back on over there and show my face.
I just added you. I am bardsong. Don’t mind the avatar.
I adore twitter. It’s like an endless conversation you can jump into and out of as you have time and it’s great for inane commentary, as you point out. Yesterday, for instance, I was having great fun tweeting the highlights of a conversation between two loud wannabe music snobs in the campus coffee shop. LOL.
Anyway, I’m glad you’re enjoying it.
I started last August only because I like talking to my friends there. I don’t do the promotions thing. I just hang out there to post inane stuff that people probably roll their eyes at and I’ve had people un-follow me but don’t let those numbers fool you. I periodically will cull the follwers list of people who are marketing and the usual spam that shows up every once in awhile and I block them. Otherwise, it’s a fun place to hang out.
In a word: ohellno.
Keishon wrote:
I wonder what it would take to get everyone to unfollow me? That would be an interesting social experiment.@
RfP: It doesn;t sound like you need anything more on your plate, and Twitter is not worth shoving anything else off.