I get Twitter: it’s stalker heaven. Those who love to stalk, stalk. Those who benefit from stalking, get stalked. And those who aspire to being stalked pretend they’re being stalked. Given the onanistic undertones to this e-symbioses [sic], I’m not sure if tweeting at Twitter makes me a twat. It’s a question that leaves me pondering the possibility that my level of twatedness is independent of my tweeter (etc.). Meanwhile, I’m using Twitter as a kind of RSS feed with ‘tude tags. In addition, I’ll continue to tweet teases to tantalize TTAC’s, uh, readers. Oh, and I got the Skype thing happening. So podcasts are back. As I mentioned before, there will be some big news next month in terms of functionality. For now, a big shout out to Bertel for his contributions to the cause, and our regular writers for feeding the beast from the goodness of their heart and the ducts of their spleen. (Any tweeting advice is most appreciated.)
“…onanistic undertone…?”
Well read and well said sir. Apart from the oblique inferences from contemporary writers like Jonathan Ames I can’t think of anyone bold enough to invoke the very word onanism as it seems so very cumbersome and quaint.
The first recommendation: use a service to shorten URLs. I like http://snipr.com/
If you have an account with them, you can save a history of your “snips”. You can also choose different prefixes and can get them very short. Any characters you can save is helpful with Twitter. For instance, this page URL shortens to:
http://sn.im/fauia
There are others like Tinyurl.
I get Twitter:
You’re one up on me.
“SO TO SPEAK: He’s all atwitter with nothing to tweet” by Joe Blundo in the Columbus Dispatch on April 5, 2009:
In what sort of hell would you be subjected to the passing thoughts of not only Martha Stewart and Marc Dann but also car dealerships and a building under construction? That hell would be called Twitter.
My daughter, who is 18 and therefore an authority on social networking, told me not to sign up.
“You won’t like it,” she said.
I signed up anyway. By doing so, I violated my rule of technology adoption: Always wait five years, to see whether it will go away on its own.
But “everyone” is Twittering: celebrities, politicians, inanimate objects. I didn’t want to be left out. (“Everyone” means about 8 million people, a scant 2 percent of the population. So why does Twitter get so much attention? Members of the media use it, and each member equals 100,000 regular people.)
* * *
Despite opening a Twitter account, I haven’t tweeted. Yet, within a day of signing up, I had four followers. They must be fans of brooding silences. My Twitter problem is that spontaneously publishing whatever comes into my head is the exact opposite of what they told me to do in journalism school. I’m still getting accustomed to the fact that the Internet is, in effect, a giant baby monitor that stands ready to disseminate any squeal I make.
You had an Audi A5 test car? Very postmodern.
an apple engineer said twitter is reverse stalking. good enough reason for me to avoid it …
At first I thought this was a dumb and too-trendy idea, but having seen the content I like it now.
But, too bad you have to use their service at all, and can’t have those sort of updates on your own site. Then again, I don’t use it, and for those who do it likely makes more sense.
A lot of heavy tweeters use HootSuite to manage outgoing and incoming traffic. Overkill for someone like me, but you’ll probably be getting a lot of followers eventually.
As an IT professional, I get smashed with these things about 2 years ahead of the general population. Oh, it’s out there for everyone, but the critical mass of adoption doesn’t happen for a couple of years or so after the launch and the insiders comb it over and some outsider finally deems it “cool”.
I was done with Twitter 2 years ago (well, I never really got started – that’s just when I decided to blow it off). But interestingly – no hits from our WAN on Twitter until about 3 months ago.
So I block it for our 2300 mouth breathers, errr…employees, just like Facebook, Myspace, and every other time wasting social networking site that screams “me, me, me!”.
But I AM thinking of changing everyone’s home page to TTAC.COM (which is above most of their reading levels, but would still be helpful to quite a few), but probably not until I quit…
“Get out of here S.T.A.L.K.E.R.!”
I think I have the image reference right.