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Twitter - I Feel Like I Just Discovered Pogs Now

By crooky | April 24, 2008

If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you might have noticed that I recently added a Twitter feed to my Wordpress sidebar. I have always been a huge nerd but Twitter (along with World of Warcraft) are things that I’ve managed to aschew. I’m still not playing WoW but I felt like I was missing something by not being on Twitter.

Now that I’ve been using it for a little while… I think I’m starting to get the vibe of it but I’m still not sure that it isn’t too nerdy for me. I’ve been tweeting almost every day about what I’ve been doing and I’ve got this plugin that tweets my three followers when I post a new blog article (how meta). One friend of mine - Sally Felkai - actually replies to my tweets and I replied to one of hers.

I guess what I’m struggling with is why anyone would want to read my tweets. When I taught Blogging for Business at UBC last year, my students were asking about Twitter and my response was “why would anyone care enough about the mundane details of your life to actively seek them out via Twitter.” Then I made some snide remarks about “AFK! Just spilled coffee on my crotch!”

So now most of the true nerds that I know have abandoned Twitter. It’s played out, apparently. Yet here I am, trying it. I put the call out to you, my dozen or so regular readers - if you’re on Twitter, help me understand why I should keep doing it. I feel like my Dad who’s just started using the Internet this year.

Is there a future in microblogging? Does anyone actually read other peoples’ Twitter feeds?

Tycho (from Penny Arcade) may have said it best in his post yesterday:

The last “tweet” I ever did really explains it all, for me. I was up in Vancouver, and I put up a message saying so, and what kinds of activities I was engaged in. After I did it, I heard a voice - my own voice - saying, “Who the fuck do you think you are? Who are you that you can force your Goddamned minutia on other people, your stupid bullshit, your stone-ground artisanal condiments? How dare you. You should be ashamed.” And I was.

Ps. This was my 100th blog article. Yay?

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Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology for ten years.

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Topics: Levity, Technology, Uncategorized |

One Response to “Twitter - I Feel Like I Just Discovered Pogs Now”

  1. Sally Felkai Says:
    April 24th, 2008 at 3:16 pm

    I hear you. I’m not sure I have time for Twitter and all the trivial posts but what I’m finding interesting is having a small insight into the minds of people I may someday work with or hire. For example, we may hire a social media consultant and Twitter is rife with them. Of course, I could just read their blogs and I do but there is something compelling about following their progress through a conference or seeing their take on industry news. I started by following MarketingProfs feed as I’m a member of that site and then I started following some of the their writers etc.

    Remember too, there’s no forcing of minutia, people get to decide to follow you or not

    I’m pretty new to it so it may all wear thin but for now, I’m still curious.
    Sally

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