Thursday, December 17, 2009

No longer a Twit


Well I gave Twitter a go, and to be honest, I got nothing out of it so I'm calling it a day.

I'm not deleting my account but I'm not bothering with it either. At first I was totally lost and said what little joy it brought me. Then Andrew Collins kindly gave me a few tips and said that I wasn't following enough people, and put out a call to get people to follow me. Within minutes I had 50 followers. Matt Rudd was helpful too, and Chris Hughes actually sent messages to me, which was appreciated. Otherwise, it was vague internet acquaintances and complete strangers.

Following and being followed by a load of people you don't know is too bizarre. With that come endless tweets about nothing much, retweets about silly petitions or urls that make no sense whatsoever. The whole thing seemed kind of pointless. It's okay if you're a well-known comedian or wit who has people hanging off their every word, and likewise if people like that who you followed actually acknowledged your presence and you had a two-way thing going on; then it might be worthwhile. It was Tweeting into thin air. Thankless and boring.

Plus, if you turned your back for even 30 seconds you'd turn around to find about 48 tweets had popped up. I couldn't keep up. And why keep up with people who are tweeting about taking their kids to school in Indiana? I'd rather read about someone walking around Whitley Bay on stilts in order to publicise the danger of warts.

I'll still to blogging. I can do it at my own pace and if you want to read it you can. It's here and not going anywhere. It won't be superseded in the blink of an eye by thousands of posts from old women in Bulgaria who want a posthumous knighthood for John Martyn.

So those of you who do tweet - how's it going for you?

7 comments:

Clair said...

I cancelled my account, it was just too much. I prefer Facebook - you can't play Scrabble on Twitter.

Chris Hughes said...

Funnily enough, I've binned off most of the comedians and other well-known people I started to follow, as I found most of them a bit annoying. I really like Caitlin Moran's writing, for example, but I found her rather irritating on Twitter. I also found myself beginning to harbour negative thoughts towards Peter Serafinowicz, which will never do, so he had to go.

It's even worse when two famous people you follow Tweet each other. Unbearable.

Most of the things I follow now on Twitter are blogs and other websites who post up links to their new stuff. It's a nice drip-feed of stuff to read during the working day.

Simon said...

Never tried it and posts like this just put me off diving in. Keeping my blog going and sticking pictures on flickr does for me.

P.S. to yesterday, I am off to gte my hair cut now and would write a cheque, only the bank have told our mobile snipper she can only pay in 4 cheques per week!

Jon Peake said...

Four cheques a week?? It's just laziness on the bank's part. They can't be bothered to process them.

Bright Ambassador said...

I haven't looked at it for ages. The last thing I found it useful for was to keep up with Radcliffe and Maconie's Hadrian's Wall walk, and that was in September.

Cocktails said...

As I've said before it's good for following venues or campaigns that you're interested in, but not really individuals.

And does this mean I've only got 4 followers now? Goddammit, how am I ever going to feel popular at this rate?

mutikonka said...

Not a Tweeter but a Tweetee. I follow a few journos, (being one myself) and their Tweets are about two hours ahead of the online news, which makes all the difference with my daily deadlines.

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