Strictly speaking I signed on to Twitter in 2007 but never used it very much. I didn’t find a way to read it that I liked, and there wasn’t that much I found interesting to read.
This changed this year though. On the application front I started using twitterific on the iPhone. It’s a great thing to check a few times a day when I have a spare couple of minutes away from my computer and not talking to anyone else, waiting for something to happen. I’ll leave the exact details of when such scenarios occur as an exercise to the reader…
Secondly, I started getting a critical mass of people to follow who wrote enough that I always had something to read, but not too much as to be spamming 40 tweets a day. OK, not usually (*ahem* Josh Graham 😉 )
One interesting thing about Twitter is that it’s very much a uni-directional broadcast. People can subscribe or unsubscribe to my feed as they want and really it doesn’t make any difference to me, and I don’t really know about it. Compare this with Facebook, for instance, which is far more of a joint relationship – if someone removes me as a friend from their contacts, they are also removed from my contacts. If they want to add me back, there has to be a confirmation on my part, so I would see them attaching and detaching to my status feed, as it were.
Because Twitter has a looser coupling, I feel more able to put more status updates out when I want, tweet when I’m drunk (although that’s seldom a good idea), etc.
Facebook was my social networking app of 2007, Twitter of 2008. It’s likely by the end of 2009 I’ll have something else going on.
You can find my twitter feed at http://twitter.com/mikebroberts
Mike Roberts