frivolous friday

(Ahh, but He does leave messages on twitter: @prayingpsalms for example...)

baby steps - what I've learned in my first two weeks on twitter

1. So this is where everyone's hanging out. I was beginning to wonder where all the people that used to poke me, throw things at me and ask me to forward stuff for them on Facebook had gone. They're all tweeting.

2. Mr. Hyatt is a very persuasive man. It was several of his blog posts that finally convinced me that joining Twitter might be a worthwhile thing to do.

• 12 Reasons to Start Twittering

• Beginner's Guide to Twitter

• The Quick Study Guide to Social Networking

3. People join Twitter for lots of reasons. This post even advises having Twitter goals. I've given some thought to mine - and realized they aren't as cut and dried as I originally thought.

• Twitter for beginners - 5 things to do as a new Twitter user

4. The difference between a Retweet and a Reply and a Direct Message and where all these things live on my Twitter page. To worldly wise Twitter users I'm sure this all sounds painfully basic but in the early days I retweeted something but erased the URL I was forwarding, treated a Retweet like a reply, and tried to send a Direct message to someone I was following when he/she wasn't following me (it isn't possible). And of course there are all the mistweets - where the tweet goes and a split second later you realize, there's a typo or the link doesn't work. I usually delete and start again.

(Does anyone know, what happens to these mistweets? Do they hang around somewhere in the vapors - or what?)

• How to get retweeted

5. Followers, following, do I reciprocal follow or not, block apparently smarmy types who follow me or not? I'm learning as I go. I've made a sort of rule of thumb: If someone I don't know starts following me, I look at the ratio of following to followers. If it's way out of proportion (following way more than followers), and especially if the web site doesn't work, I block.


6. I bless the day I found and installed Tweetdeck. Suddenly it all made sense and felt doable, mainly because in Tweetdeck you can make groups. I put all my writing friends in one group, friends and family in another, big names that I follow for all their good information (poobahs) in a third, news sites in a fourth. Facebook status updates appear in still another. It's all organized neatly in columns (never mind that the 'deck' takes up my whole desktop!)

(Perhaps you my FB friends and family are wondering why I've suddenly become responsive. It's because everything is there in one place with status updates chirping as they come in and your profiles just a click away.)


7. There's a blog devoted solely to Twitter (probably more than one), but I follow this one . There's lots to learn, but there's more than a little help online.


8. Twitter is fun, and addictive, and interesting... Wanna follow me?

chameleon tendencies and other aspects of online life

Jennifer Lowther (Vancouverite and on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and other social networking sites) quoted in a National Post article:

"I have definitely found that my online life is now bleeding into my personal life.... People I have never met follow me on Twitter and they know me, and they expect me to know who they are."

Managing multi online profiles ("The average Canadian has seven online profiles, according to Microsoft Canada research") can be tricky. Living online has its drawbacks. The article points out several:

no secrets: "You can meet a girl or a boy and before you've had your first or second date, you know who they have been with, who was their last boyfriend or girlfriend - it makes for interesting conversations."

a type of curfew: "If I don't upload a photo on Flickr, or update Twitter for two days, people send out a rescue party," Krug (Kris - Vancouver photographer and member of multi social sites) said. "I don't want my digital life to be the entirety of my identity."

dossiers: "It's also leading to a 24/7 surveillance that would make spies look like mere slouches. We are assembling the kind of dossiers that most intelligence agencies would kill for and we are doing it without them lifting a finger .... I'm not suggesting this is going to be some massive Big Brother conspiracy, but it requires a little bit of thought - how much of our lives are we revealing and how much do we want to reveal?"- Rob Cottingham - Social Signal

Read all of "Twitter, Facebook beget the 'social chameleon' and self-surveillance."

My feelings on the subject:

Why I don’t twitter

What are you doing?
What am I doing?
Who needs to know

I’m currently contemplating
another trip to the fridge
and all that coffee
has sent me to the bathroom
gazillion times?

I don’t care
that you heard from your big-name agent
are over-the-top excited
and just posted to your blog

Tweet tweet
Scratch that trip to the fridge
I’m going outside
where it’s spring
and I can listen to the birds
twitter back and forth

What a return flight
First dibs on this tree
I’ve found true love!
Tweet tweet

© 2009 by Violet Nesdoly