Why I Use Twitter and Why You Probably Can’t Read It
I’ve registered with Twitter about two weeks or so ago as an experiment. To be honest, Twitter was one of the many Web phenomena that I thought I simply couldn’t care less about. I neglect my blogs enough as it is, I sometimes have to get over myself to load pictures onto Flickr and I may or may not ignore your Skype message. This is not because I don’t like all these things, but because they take time. At least, they take me time, because I like to feel comfortable with my blog entries and I like titles (or even descriptions) for my images, and I don’t want to start a Skype conversation when I just wanted to look up something quick on my computer.
So, yes, I’m a geek girl and I spend a lot of time doing things on my computer that I know aren’t relevant to anybody. The list of tools (and I use tools in the broadest sense here, so think blogs, flickr, librarything, Skype, last.fm, etc.) I actually use are maybe quite random. Or maybe they’re not, but I can’t really give you a good enough reason, why I use this and not that. Presumably there are quite a list of small reasons that add together and make me keep my account here and delete my account there after two weeks. It’s trial and error and all boils down to what proves to add at least a little value to my day to day life.
So, my reasons for not twittering until recently? I can’t really tell you… I just didn’t think it would be any interesting for me. Or I just didn’t care enough to wonder whether it would be of any interest to me. And I guess that’s about it.
However, there was an incident at work that made me wonder whether Twitter could actually be of some real value. I won’t go into any detail about the what and where and why, that’s just how it started.
I registered and wrote about four updates and then didn’t use it for about two weeks – and maybe I would have left it at that. Then I read about a colleague of mine starting to use it as an experiment and went back for a second try, and that second try had me going on until now. Admittedly that’s just a week, but it’s starting to actually be fun and I think I might keep going.
So, for the first part of the title of this post, that’s why I use Twitter. It started as an experiment and once I found people I actually know using it too, it started feeling kind of good. I’m now at five followers, who I all know personally (four are colleagues, one is a blog friend) and this actually is the perfect bridge to the second part of the title: why you probably can’t read my tweets.
The reason for that is quite simple. Twitter in my opinion is about writing about what I’m doing (again, using „doing“ in the broadest sense) at the moment. Part of what I’m doing is what of I’m doing at my job. It’s not a top secret job, I’m neither a secret agent nor a spy, don’t get the wrong impression here. And yes, I could choose not to write about anything job related, but I chose I’d rather restrict who can read my tweets than restrict what I feel I can write about. So, unless I know who you are and unless you belong to that group of people who I’d want to share my daily adventures with, I won’t allow you to follow my tweets.
I’d say this is nothing personal, but I realize it is exactly that. Only you shouldn’t feel bad if you’re not one of the chosen one, because I can tell you that the list of the not chosen ones is a lot, lot longer than that other list. And it’s not because I actively don’t like you, it’s because I just don’t know you well enough. Or not at all.