I can give you no reason, but until this week I was not on twitter. Call it a last ditch effort to slow down in this fast paced world, call it reticence from a reluctant facebook junkie, call it laziness. This week I caved, this week I joined twitter.
Wanting my first tweet to be something worthy of the first words in a new forum, I tweeted “Mr. Watson–come here–I want to see you.” Very original I know, I wonder if there is data anywhere on how many people have used that as their first tweet? But here I am @MaineMummy ready to talk to the world in 120 characters or less, on a somewhat daily basis. Within two minutes I had my first followers, my first problem and a rekindled crush, I also had my first game of online Marco Polo trying to find a fellow GeekMom. My first follower? The ever shiny Chaos Mandy. My first problem? A follower I did not know posting rude things on her twitter account. I did what any self respecting blogger does, and reached out to my community for advice on unwanted followers. Amongst the responses was the idea that I keep my twitter account private. I didn’t even know that was an option! So now the question was not to tweet or not to tweet, but to stay public or not? Well the whole point seems to me based on the fact that it’s a public forum so I choose public and will just block the spam tweeters from my feed. The way I see it, if I want to follow someone I’ve never met, surely I should remain open to the same thing.
This then opened up a whole new realm of options. To link to facebook or not link to facebook? Seeing this option explained so many random facebook status updates by my friend Moose. As most of my facebook contacts are not twitterpated, I chose to not make this link, and therefore keep them from getting confused. Actually it was self preservation, I have many very active friends who would have commented on every single tweet update wondering what on earth I was saying. For my own sanity I have to cut the virtual strings somewhere.
Ah those virtual strings though, those virtual strings that now tie me ever so remotely to the witty banter of Brent Spiner, utter nonsense of The Bloggess, and the oh so glorious avatar of Jonathan Frakes. And there my friends you have the rekindled crush and the reason for my finally hopping on board the Twitter train. The ability to be remotely connected to the man of my teenage dreams, Jonathan Frakes. There are worse reasons for joining twitter right? And I am not reveling in my new found ability to create words from twitter, I tweet, I tweeted, I’m twitterpated, no reveling here, none at all, not a tweet of a revel.
Yay for me being the first to friend you on Twitter 😀
I keep my twitter public and unlinked to my FB. I tend to post more private things to FB while twitter is my public account. I like being able to read the the adventures of my favorite celebrities which is the big draw of Twitter for me.
Psst… You get 140 characters. Congratulations on getting 20 extra characters you didn’t know you had! 🙂
My world just keeps expanding! This is one of those moments where I need to express that you made me laugh out loud, but I hate using lol!
I resisted Twitter forever too, and just started in… May, I think. And now I’m kind of addicted. I still don’t think I use it quite PROPERLY, but I love it– I use it mostly like a news feed, I follow things like Publishers Weekly and The AV Club and browse the headlines for links that look interesting. But it’s also been fun seeing thoughts of authors and other public figures I love!
I’ve always especially liked your posts here, so I’m following you, now, too!
That’s it. I have resisted until now, but fellow geeks near and far are jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, so . . . I’ll go check it out. Semi-grudgingly.
Nevermind. I chickened out. :/
I had many chicken outs before last week.