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Okay, so one of the things I've been thinking about lately is Twitter, mostly because everyone I know seems to use it, and some have started asking if I'm on Twitter.

I'm not.

Yet.

Mostly I'm not because I don't really, well, grok Twitter.  Okay, I get this much:

But to be honest?  I don't really want to know if you're having coffee, or late for work, or mowing the lawn, or cooking dinner.  I suppose that makes me a bad friend, but I don't really want to know all the small, minute, intimate moments of your day-to-day life.  I think I would find that really rather overwhelming.

It *does* interest me, though, to discover you are a baseball fan, or that you're reading a great book I might be interesting in reading, too.  It would interest me to know what, say, the first day of spring is like in *your* part of the world, and compare and contrast it to my own experience.

I suppose the answer at this point is to jump in, sign up, and see how Twitter actually works. 

Are you on Twitter?  How do you use it?  Care to share your thoughts with me?

Here in the comments, of course, not on Twitter :-) 

Not yet.

Comments

[Rob (latterly The Other)]

From what I gather about Twitter, you're not alone, possibly not even in the minority (OK probably not in the majority either), in feeling that knowing absolutely *everything* that a friend is doing is WTMI.

r

[katherine]

No, I know that, but I decided to throw the question out there to those who *do* use Twitter, since neither you nor I do.

I suspect there are people making very good use of Twitter. I also suspect that getting good use of Twitter means choosing whom you follow carefully.

There's also the problem of who will follow you -- you can't control that -- and in both cases (whom you follow, who follows you) it may take time to build a set of folks who do provide something of value.

Hmm. Just like in Real Life.

[zydeco fish]

I am not sure I get it either. I already have too many networks to update, and I don't need something that makes me sound like a twit :-) I almost joined once, but then I changed my mind. Besides, I think my updates would be boring.

[John Meadows]

I'm going to use the metaphor of Social Networking recreational drugs to describe twitter. People who just use email and perhaps read the occasional blog I would label as Social Networking "social drinkers"; they will have a glass of wine or a beer or two at a party, but that's about it.

People who use Facebook or MySpace frequently are the pot smokers of Social Networking; they enjoy the buzz of Social media, and although some are heavier users than others, for most it doesn't dominate their life.

Then we come to Twitter users; in Social Networking terms, I get the sense that many of these folks are mainlining -- Twitter has become an inseparable part of their existence; life has become a sequence of 140 character "fixes," and being away from Twitter is uncomfortable, the "jonesing" begins almost immediately.

And that's where I get off the train.