To Tweet or Not To Tweet

Back in 2009 I created a twitter account. Not entirely sure why I did it at the time but I did. However, it just laid in silence until a month ago.

I was having dinner with a friend who decided she would try twitter for a month and give it a try. I agreed to tweet as well. It really was very easy to do. Keeping to the 140 character limit was hard at first but that was almost the fun of it all. Every so often I'll post something but it's not too frequently. Most of my tweets are either in response to some thing I have read from one of the people I am following or it is a catalog/journal of my thoughts.

Yesterday I had a discussion with a friend about Twitter. She was wondering if she should join. I told her that like all social media, it can be a time suck. However, the character limits make it less so. And I said you can follow whatever you want and if there happens to be a link to an article, you can choose to read it or leave it for another time. So in that regard, I thought it better than another form of social media. Also I'm not savvy enough to figure out if there are ways to chat or anything like that on Twitter. I'm happy to not know about that capability if it does exist.

What I also enjoy about Twitter is that it's often quite funny or thought provoking based on who you follow. I have a couple of comedians in my list, some Sesame Street characters and a few authors as well as some news papers. And some people really do tweet more than others so you can adjust your list based on who is being too verbal or not enough.

In my discussion with my friend she was saying that a number of people think that social media is a form of connecting with others when, in fact, it is far more isolating than it appears. I tended to agree with her. Just because you are 'connected' to the internet or social media doesn't mean you are necessarily make deep connections with others. But I also can see how others would think we are totally wrong.

In the end, I am enjoying my tweeting and twitter. It's been fun so far and hope it will continue to be.