Thoughts of New Tweeter

6 July 2009

It’s 1 am, and my psychology paper stares at me from the laptop screen before me. 500 more words to go, and I’m completely exhausted. I’d been writing for two hours straight, and my fingers lingered above the keyboard, frozen and unable to move. I need a break.

Within one click, I’m at my facebook home page. “Michelle Matthews and Darren Shelton ended their relationship,” I read. “19 of your friends are attending ‘Party on Green Street.’” A few seconds later, I discover that my sister’s boyfriend’s birthday is this week, and that facebook recommends I become friends with a Matt Quirk, a kid I went to high school with. Funny that, we have 71 friends in common. I add him as a friend—with a personal message asking about his soccer team—and jot down a note in my planner to call Sean on his birthday. I RSVP to the party on Green Street, send Michelle a message about her break-up with Darren, and read the wall-to-wall of my best friend and the guy she’s currently dating. This is good stuff.

Ten minutes later, my facebook fix is fulfilled (well…it’s never really fulfilled, but I’d taken care of the basics). I return to my psych paper with a clear head and a fine-tuned social life, and the remaining pages are polished off in no time.

Welcome to my undergraduate study routine.

This morning I joined Twitter, the second cousin to facebook and myspace. The Home page is similar to the Home page of facebook, but as a follower of only 9 people thus far, I’m not exactly intrigued yet.

I have 1,027 facebook friends. OK, so maybe I don’t keep up with all of them, and I might not remember exactly how I know every single one (that dude from that party that one weekend…that chick in my English class who peer edited my paper….somehow, these people become your friends.) But if I ever wanted to get in touch with Ray, the engineer from freshman year who helped me get rid of a virus once (a few facebook messages could fix my PC problems), or Jeannie, the cellist from orchestra (my brother is getting married and wants to hire a string quartet), facebook is the first place I turn.

I know two people with a Twitter account, and neither have any updates. That certainly doesn’t make for a very fun study break.

In fact, as I scroll down my Twitter Home Page, I’m pretty damn bored. This is hauntingly like facebook, except…not. Without any Twitter friends, I have no gossip to read. No birthdays to remember. No ex-boyfriends to stalk and no photos to admire.

But, let’s say I want to know what people are saying about the whole Michael Jackson thing. I just type in his name into the search box, and a stream of thoughts is presented to me. Youtube videos, news stories, quizzes and rants about the dead King of Pop. Plus, I can “follow” news sites such as The Onion or cnn.com and stay up-to-date with the latest stories.

As a 22 year old recent college grad, facebook is all I’ve ever known. I signed up for an account during the summer of 2005, and when my first year of college started that fall, I remember getting multiple friend requests every day for months. I searched my gmail contacts for Twitter users to almost no avail, and since signing up this morning I’ve received three e-mails notifying me that new people are now following me; I don’t know any of them. 

Twitter currently stands as the third largest social networking site on the web (after facebook and myspace). With over 50 million monthly visits by almost six million unique visitors, I’m willing to give Twitter a chance. Who knows—by the time I’m done with graduate school, perhaps I’ll be twitching without a daily dosage of Twitter.

6 August 2009

It’s been exactly one month since I first dove into the Twitter experience, and I’m slowly getting the hang of it. I’ve found myself logging on more regularly than I thought—a few times a week, I suppose—to see if anyone has anything interesting to say. 99% of the time, I’m successful.

At first, I was following mostly news organizations and colleagues from work. But I found that my homepage was overflowing with TIME twits and CNN news blogs; it was too much information with too little relevance to my life. I was bored.

There I was, with very few “real” people to follow (not just news feeds spat out at me every hour) and no thoughts on how to find those people. There has to be something I can do, I kept thinking. There’s gotta be more to Twitter than this.

I diagnosed my biggest problem as the news sites. An enthusiastic and budding journalist, I had thought that following the media outlets would keep me connected to everything that was going on in the world. Instead, it overwhelmed me. When I really thought about it, I got my news from news.com.au anyway, and I’d already read about many of the twits posted.

So I unfollowed these sites, leaving one American news site (The Onion) and one Australian news site (TripleJnews). I wonder—do people know when you “unfollow” them? Is it as insulting as being “unfriended” on facebook? My guess is no.

I’d been followed by a few more people that I don’t know, and decided to follow them back. Why not? Unlike facebook, there is almost no personal information about me linked to my twitter account. In fact, the only thing that people know about me is that I’m currently in Sydney, Australia. I chose to make my twitter name (screenname? Login?) my actual name, but that was my own preference.  I felt no anxiety or immediate feelings of  “who are you?” “how did you find me?” “why do you want to be my friend?” and “we don’t have any friends in common…DENY” that usually accompany new friend requests on facebook.

While only one or two of these people had interesting twits, it was the followers (of the followers, of the followers…) of my followers that turned out to be the coolest people to keep tabs on. I began following these people, attracted to clever quotes and nifty facts or links that caught my fancy.

It’s much easier to follow someone on Twitter than to friend someone on facebook. The process is far less daunting, and I feel absolutely no stalkerish, creepy or malicious feelings when clicking the “follow” button. The twitter community is much more receptive to unfamiliar communications, and as such provides a welcoming environment for newbies such as myself.

After filtering out the incessantly twitting news sites, my home page was much cleaner and easier to read. I was left with really interesting twits that took me to news stories (ones that actually affected my life,only a few hours old), job offers (I wasn’t qualified, unfortunately), and statistics about Australian society that made me go “Hmmm. Interesting.” Now that is motivation to log on.

I’m starting to catch on to this whole Twitter thing, and I’m even inspired to post my own twits.  At first, my twits were fairly consistent with my facebook status, i.e. “I just got a job!” or “I miss my brother.” But gradually I’ve modified my twits to be more conducive to the Twitter atmosphere; in other words, I started posting less selfishly and more informatively. Sure, I tell my facebook friends that I’m tired from a long weekend of work, but on Twitter I feel like I have to do my part. Instead, I post a comment about a news story and paste the link into my twit.

Admittedly, I’m still on facebook everyday, and my homepage of facebook (the news feed) provides me with far more interesting snippets of my friends’ and family’s lives, in addition to news stories and youtube videos and funny photos.

But I haven’t given up quite yet. There’s hope for you yet, Twitter!

26 October 2009

For the last two months, my twisted twaddles have been tweaked and tuned to tie in with other tweets on Twitter. And to be perfectly honest...it's done me no good.

I went from tweeting once a month, to every few weeks, to every few days, to every few weeks again. For a while there, my posts were 4-5 days apart. Maybe I was finally getting into Twitter, or maybe I was just bored. But at the end of the day, my friends and family are on facebook (and not my employers and co-workers—and if they are, they can't see my page) and I quite simply feel more comfortable posting pictures, comments, links and status updates in a place on the Internet where I know who my audience is. Not that I'm looking to post inappropriate messages all the time, but perhaps it would be best for my boss NOT to read that I'm laying around hungover all day, or to see that picture of me from freshman year at my first frat party...I digress.

Twitter just isn't for me. I can't say that it's a generational gap, though I wish I could. If Mariah Carey and Ashton Kutcher are tweeting, then everyone else in their early 20s should be able to, too. I can't say that it's too difficult to navigate, because it's easier than making break-n-bake cookies. I can't say that I don't have time, because it takes less than 30 seconds to log on, tweet, and publish. I can't say that I have nobody to follow, because following someone on Twitter takes one click and is effective instantaneously. But I also can't say that I didn't give it a go, because I definitely did. I'm confident in saying that I gave Twitter a shot, and now I have 14 followers, I'm following 18, and I've made 16 tweets from 6 July-26 October. That's 16 tweets in 112 days, with an average of exactly one tweet per week. No joke! So there it is. Twitter just tisn't for me, I'm afraid. And according to a TechCrunch article published on 13 October, the gap between Twitter and Facebook is widening—with facebook in the lead:

Facebook grew by over 3 million unique visitors during the month of September, from 92.2 million unique visitors in August to 95.5 million unique visitors in September. Twitter, on the other hand, is completely flat-lining, barely growing over the past month. In August, Twitter received 20.8 million unique visits in the U.S. compared to 20.9 million unique visits in September.

So there you have it. I'm officially in the facebook camp, and there's nothing I can do about it. I pitched my tent in the twitter field, but the stars just wouldn't shine for me. Plus, there were 300 million users on the other side, and 1,050 of those millions were my friends and family. Facebook forever!

**disclaimer written on 29 October, 2011**
I'm now on twitter almost daily: www.twitter.com/mariah_onfiah :-)