Posted in Sites & Services, Web
I started this post almost 3 months ago with the tentative title: Twitter Shitters – No one cares. The original post was heavily influenced by this comic & post at Penny Arcade. As well as a friend who decided to link their Facebook status to Twitter which caused them to show up in my news feed every 20 minutes. The whole concept of micro-blogging seemed stupid to me. I mean who really cares that you’re sitting on a bus waiting to get home? I sure didn’t. Luckily, the post didn’t turn out that great and I ultimately decided not to publish it. Since then my thoughts about Twitter have changed quite drastically and when I discovered this post sitting the unpublished queue I decided to revisit it.
My conversion from Twitter-hater to Twitter-liker (I’ve yet to tweet while taking a dump) started when I created my account way back in January. I did it mainly because I’m just plain interested in the web and create accounts for almost every service I come across. At the time I didn’t see much of a use for the service and quickly forgot about it. I didn’t think about it again until after I made the decision to go to PAX. I found a group of people in the PAX forums who were trading Twitter IDs and forming an official Twitter group appropriately called the Twitter Shitters. I joined in since I figured it would be a good way to get connected with the PAX community and give me an easy way to keep track of anything I wanted to write about while I was there.
Before I left for PAX, I linked Twitter to my cell so I could update via text message so I wouldn’t have to rely on my phone’s crappy WAP web browser to update. My lack of a decent web browser kept me somewhat isolated from the community aspect but throughout the day I found myself updating more and more. Since it turned out to be such an excellent way to keep track of everything I saw and is probably the main reason I wrote so much about PAX . While I couldn’t regularly check out what everyone else was up to it was neat to get a glimpse of what everyone had done throughout the day and their thoughts were. There was even a meet up of the TSers which I unfortunately had to skip due to a very early flight.
Since then I’ve become hooked on the service. I follow Wil Wheaton who in addition to posting amusing thoughts also lets me know when he’s written something new on his blog. Felicia Day keeps me up to date with the Guild and Dr. Horrible news. Even CNN has a Twitter account for breaking news. Beyond the news and updates I get Twitter is actually a lot of fun when you have a group of semi-connected people like the TSers. I get a kick out of some the “conversations” that spring up. Which range from frustrations at work and puppy cams to the latest video games and to strange observations on life. I find myself compelled to update or respond to others several times a day.
As much as I like Twitter, one thing I refuse to do is link it to my Facebook status. I don’t want to be the guy who updates his Facebook status every 20 minute with the current status of his commute, that’s just annoying. I figure if anyone is that interested in me they can always create an account and follow me.
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