I’m still trying to figure this whole Twitter thing out. Is tweeting really worth the condescending looks I get from my wife? Am I going to get fed up with all the porn and marketing spam? Does anyone actually read my random and always pointless thoughts?
I started tweeting in March of 2008, well before any celebrities jumped on board. I initially used it to journal my drinking adventures. My first set of tweets comes from the 2008 ACC Basketball Tournament. Every year I take off ACC Friday to get totally hammered and on this occasion I sent a tweet every time I finished a beer. The night ends with me cussing at Twitter because that’s just what happens when you drink all day long. For the next couple months I only tweeted about beers I drank or bars I went to. I really wish that I would have used it to journal all the beers I had to drink for my plate at the Flying Saucer. 200 different beers and I don’t remember 90% of them!
Still not knowing what to really do with Twitter I started posting awful status updates like “just got done with the gym” or “that soup was good”. That was certainly the low point of my Twitter usage. I’m at the point now where I tweet thoughts that only I would think are funny. I’m not a very funny person or a good writer so these are probably just as bad as my old “Yay it’s Friday” tweets. So lets get to the real reason I use Twitter. I’m a listener. I’ve come to depend on Twitter for great design links. Now I’m only following 25 people and of those only about half tweet on a regular basis. If I were to double that number I think it would be quite difficult to keep up with every update. So I ask how do some people manage to follow hundreds of people? The answer is they don’t. The only reason someone would follow that many people is because they are trying to get a follow in return. It’s the old I’ll link to you if you link to me trick. I don’t care what you have to say, just make me look more important. It’s a popularity contest plain and simple. Did we really need a service that easily allows narcissists to broadcast their stupid opinions to millions of people?
My hope is the Twitter fad will die out and the service will return to geeks tweeting to other geeks. I’ll continue to use it as my RSS reader and occasionally post random thoughts like “Hardees commercials are one step away from being soft core porn”. Seriously, you celebrities and the people that follow them need to get a life.
Now follow me! @lesjames
