Twitter – the phenomenom that allows you to try to say something important, meaningful, or just wasteful in 140 characters or less.
Twitter is just like any other social networking website out there – you sign up, you start posting (or tweeting in this case), follow what other people are saying, and people follow what you are saying. As you follow people, you start to see what they are saying on your Twitter homepage. Not a bad way to keep in touch with others right? I agree. It is a great way to get a quick thought out or bounce an idea off of someone if you are following each other. However, Twitter has a downside..besides its bad downtime and constant “over capacity” warnings, some people seem to find it neccessary to tweet EVERYTHING they are thinking or doing. For example, Robert Scoble on Twitter. When Twitter was getting popular, I started following him…soon I realized that if I followed him I wouldn’t be able to see what anyone else was doing because he was using the service so much that I only saw his updates. In fact, now that I think about it, maybe Twitter is over capacity because of Scoble accessing it from every means possible: online, desktop widgets, IM clients, text messages, emails, blog plugins, and anything else out there. So needless to say, I stopped following him.
Now, as I cruise the blogosphere, I have started to see different “Follow me on Twitter” images such as I have in the right sidebar. No problem here. Taking it one step further, that person has something along the lines of “You Follow, I Follow” posted underneath that. Meaning that if you follow them, they will follow you. Almost sounds like the pregnancy pact of teen girls who agreeed to get pregnant together and have their babies together.
Anyway, if you start following every person who follows you, you soon will not be able to follow any conversation that might be starting on Twitter, you won’t be able to catch all of the replies or “@” sent your way in a timely manner, and you won’t know what is going on. So, I encourage you to check out Twitter, try out the service, follow me on Twitter, and engage in conversations with people. However, if you follow me, there is not gaurentee that I will follow you – I am just putting this out there. I have been receiving more and more notifications of people following me on Twitter and that is great. I love the opportunity to connect with new people and network however I will not be following you all just because you follow me; that defeats the purpose of the service to me. When I receive an email saying someone is following me, I check their page to see who else they are following, how long they have been apart of Twitter, and what they are tweeting about. If I like what I see, I’ll follow; if not, I’ll check back at it later.
See you on Twitter…if the site stays up long enough.
the problem is, I think I did not have enough time to do all of that (I mean “When I receive an email saying someone is following me, I check their page to see who else they are following, how long they have been apart of Twitter, and what they are tweeting about. If I like what I see, I’ll follow; if not, I’ll check back at it later”)
FWIW: the “pregnancy pact” (an urban myth) originally stated that the girls would get pregnant and /raise their children together/” Sounds more like communal child rearing rather than a joint delivery process.
And don’t follow me, I’m lost …