I'm not sure how your daily routine starts but mine starts and ends with Twitter. When I started on Twitter many moons ago, it was a map of the world with little icons, tweeting into bubbles. As there was only me, a couple of hundred Japanese and a few nerds over in the US, the conversation wasn't exactly riveting. Oh and the Japanese tweets were in Japanese and I couldn't understand a single character. However I persisted and it was the thought of people on the other side of the planet commenting on their state of play from downtown Tokyo that got me hooked.
But Twitter today is a force to be reckoned with. And for the non-twitterers out there, basically you set up an account and as with Facebook you have the option of posting a status, you know the kind: "My day cannot get any worse", "Archie just put my brand new underwear down the toilet, labels and all!" etc. However you don't necessarily have to tweet, following people is much more fun. Following people falls into numerous categories: friends, famous peeps (actors, singers, fashion etc), news channels, government bodies, magazines etc etc.
Not everyone tweets all day, every day. But there are prolific tweeters out there and you do get a mix of the informative and the hysterically funny. Your favourite comedian on TV generally ends up being the dullest git on Twitter (Dara O'Briaian being the exeception and Joan Rivers) and when certain celebrities aren't holed up in a Priority Clinic and have access to their phone they can start off a stream of conciousness that makes you understand why limited access to the internet is sometimes required for these people.
Aside from this it's a platform for honest communication. It's unregulated and so incredibly informative. We have witnessed some huge moments in history this year and oddly for a few of them I was out of the UK. However with WIFI on my Iphone and my twitter account, I followed the Arab Spring from my hotel room in Seville, reading the tweets from all these brave men and women trying to overthrow their despotic President and the News International hacking scandal (read from a beach bar in Paxos). Journalists tweeting their unfettered opinions, celebrities who had been hacked, tweeting their reactions to what was happening there and then. I love it.
I do like being connected and I wish more of my friends tweeted, I'd use Facebook less, I imagine. twitter.com/spottedinsoho
3 comments:
You've forgotten about following the London riots from a Santa Monica hotel room.
Twitter has stolen the ability to 'break news' globally from 24hr TV news channels, just as TVnews stole that ability from newspapers. Its just far quicker. More and more news we will hear about first on twitter, and it'll be in far more depth than most redtop newspapers manage. The deaths of Michael Jackson and recently Amy Winehouse are examples of how much quicker twitter is, they both where tending on twitter more than an hour before TV news had confirmed and finally reported. Exclusives now belong to twitter.
But on the bad side twitter is like a technology cigarette - whenever someone has 5mins or nothing to do, out pops the phone. but as yet I don't think anyone's died from doing 40 tweets a day.
Oh thanks Norman... you're right there was so much more. I like the technology cigarette analogy, thanks for your comments!
I am trying to figure out the whole twitter world but really feeling lost. I know it will come and I am ready for it as I'm actually getting bored with facebook.
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