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
* "Whats the difference?", I hear you cry.
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.
ReplyDeleteBut 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"
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.
ReplyDeleteMy 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).
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.
ReplyDelete11.38
ReplyDeleteWhere's your blog and twitter? I'll give you some of my time.
surely this is just taking stalking to another level?
ReplyDelete8:50AM I had no problem with Angus Twitter-stalking me. I put the content out there, so it's my choice.
ReplyDeleteWould've preferred Cameron Diaz as my stalker, tho' :-)