At the recommendation of my friend, Randy Elrod, I decided to start “twittering.” I have now been engaging in the practice for about a week.
What is twittering? Twitter’s home page says it best:
Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
Twittering (who knew that was a verb, let alone a gerund?!) requires very little time. For starters, you can only enter 140 characters at a time. This means that you must post very short, direct-to-the-point messages. In practice, this means that, as a twitterer (who knew that was a noun?!), you update several times a day, but it takes almost no time at all. I do most of it from my iPhone.
So what's the advantage? So far, I think there are four:
- It allows family, friends, and others to follow your activity throughout the day and keep up with your life. You can even get these updates via your cell phone, as a text message. It's kind of like the Truman Show meets instant messaging.
- It allows you to meet new friends, who tend to be on the cutting edge of technology. I am following several people that I would have never met otherwise. These are relationships—or potential relationships—that may prove very fruitful for the future. We’ll see.
- It allows me to experience first-hand a new technology that almost 1 million people are using. It may be a complete waste of time but it is free and the investment of time is miniscule.
- It allows me to think consciously about my life. What am I doing now? What kind of story is my life telling? Is this really what I want to be doing? Could I—should I—be choosing something different?
I don’t know if twittering will become a long-term habit. Knowing me, I will eventually get bored with it. But, for now, I am enjoying the experience. I have committed to trying it for 30 days.
If you want to “follow me,” you can do do my joining Twitter.com and officially following me. Just sign up and follow the directions. It’s pretty simple.
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