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The truths they don't want you to read....

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Twitter

Against my better judgement I was persuaded to sign up for Twitter by a friend.

On logging in and creating my account, I was able to watch the friend continuously blogging about his daily activities, and I must confess to being amazed at the interest I found in the small snippets he as putting up every half an hour, or so.

It was fascinating to see the detail of a persons life, movements and views developing over the day and I found myself strangely enthralled by it all.

So as Twitter for me?

Not at all.
  • I'm not web enabled on my phone - I don't need it
  • I'm not able to text accurately - I use predictive text, very badly, much to the annoyance and mirth of my good lady wife, but which would result in unintelligible gibberish appearing frequently*
  • I don't have time. I really just don't have time to post even a few words about what I am doing every hour or so, this blog is the limit of what I can achieve
  • For reasons of client confidentiality most of what is interesting cannot be repeated
  • The bits that could be repeated are either boring ('interesting' tax issues, or beating the taxman) or deserve a full blog posting
Having added the widget to the blog, I find myself with two followers despite not having written a word, and having no intention to do so. If you would like to follow me then click the link on the right, and I'll see just how many followers I can get without ever writing anything.

* "Whats the difference?", I hear you cry.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm very much in two minds about it. Although my brother who teaches some special needs kids uses it quite well with his class - the class has a twitter tweet? (not sure what you call a twitter feed) which means that the kids can post what they are doing through the day and parents are able to follow along - it seems to work quite well.

But yeah, working in IT a lot of my twitter stuff would consist of "was polite to muppet on phone, then smashed another handset into pulp after hanging up"

Anonymous said...

Heh. I made the same error on my first go at twitter. Now there's a few hundred people I follow, and a few hundred who follow me. Once you have found your crowd, keeping those you follow pruned and added to takes little time.

My crowd is a mixture of Hebridean residents, work colleagues, potential clients (many of whom tweet about funding calls they are putting out, giving me a time advantage) and actual clients.

Speaking of Time? I am emailing far far less - and also blogging a lot less as well - so there's no extra time used. I've gone from 10-200 emails a day to less than 20. Email is so 1990s anyway.

Blogging I am gradually going off, as I get little out of it, and my blog tends to attract fanatics, people with a rosy-eyed view of the Outer Hebrides, and trolls whose attempted spamming I save for a rainy day. I get much more back, from far little effort, from Twitter.

What I get back. From my followers - lots of leads about work related funding; news from the sector; and ...

Oh, and here's the killer. I've got more work in paid value directly from twitter-enabled discussions than I have done with the Comhairle and WIE combined. The last contract I got from twitter-enabled discussions will pay the mortgage for the next 3+ years.

(btw the Twitter website is cumbersome; it's much easier to use an app such as Twitterfon on an iPhone).

Anonymous said...

Your reaction is interesting and I think you're slightly missing the point of the exercise. It's not about slavishly following one person's life, and not about making pronouncements. Authoritative hint-dropping not required. Just talk, or not, as the day allows. I notice you've doubled your crowd of followers.

Anonymous said...

11.38

Where's your blog and twitter? I'll give you some of my time.

Anonymous said...

surely this is just taking stalking to another level?

Anonymous said...

8:50AM I had no problem with Angus Twitter-stalking me. I put the content out there, so it's my choice.

Would've preferred Cameron Diaz as my stalker, tho' :-)