Back in November of 2007 I wrote a post about how I use Twitter. It’s been 8 months since then and partially because of how my travel schedule has impacted my usage, partially because of changes to some features that Twitter as been messing with, and partially because of a recent increase in comments from people I’ve never met complaining that I wasn’t following them, I thought it was time to update the post.
In general I still use Twitter for the same basic functions I did before:
- Keep up to date on the lives of a few close friends.
- Keep up to date on the activities of friends in the same city as me, potentially leading to IRL meet ups.
- Have conversations.
That’s it, and in that order of importance. I certainly understand that not everyone uses Twitter for the same reasons or in the same fashion and I don’t assume people will use it the same way I do, and all I ask is that people don’t assume I use it the same way they do. The biggest issue is that Twitter fills a very specific need for me, one that no other service has been able to fill as well, and I’m not rushing to give that up by changing how I use it. As I stated back in November, in order for me to actually be able to do the things I’ve listed above, I have to be very conservative with who I follow. That is, I have to follow my close friends, my friends in the same cities I’m in, and the people I’m having conversations with. The truth is for some reason there are a bunch of people following me who I’ve never met, and while I’m flattered that they care what I have to say (or not say as is more often the case) if I followed every single person who followed me my view of Twitter would be completely filled with people I didn’t know talking about things I’m not involved with and I’d miss the things by the people I do know and those talking about things I am involved with. Feel free to draw parallels to the UK filming every single inch of public space with CCTV cameras which creates such a backlog that they can never effectively use any of it. Point is I don’t want to give up the primary thing I use Twitter for just to prevent awkward social situations. This is the same situation I was in before, but I want to also spend a moment or two talking about how things have changed since then.