Twitter Diary Week 3: Tweeting every 30 minutes for a whole day
Week 3: Tweeting every 30 minutes for a whole day
16 Feb
I accepted this challenge convinced it would be a piece of cake. Shouldn’t we have made it “Tweet every TWenty”?
Nevertheless, I started off badly. I choose a Monday. Shouldn’t be too busy, I thought. Woke up late and only had time to tweet once I was on the bus. I realised pretty quickly that on a slow day, tweets take the form of artificial observations, for instance: “Tower Hamlets/NHS campaign: “Love is… Getting an HIV test”. How depressing.”
More often than not, they’re the fleeting thoughts you’d normally keep to yourself (and for a good reason): “Why does Hall Street near City always smell so strongly of dog poo? Nearly gagged on my way in.”
I realised that Twitter does perform one useful service – at least I wasn’t boring my real friends with this stuff.
When social networking guru Robin Hamman came into City to talk to us about Twitter, I don’t think this was the “usefulness” he was talking about. People seem to use twitter in three ways.
There are those who, like me, use it to post random details about their life. People like Dean Gaffney, who reveals “Had 3 and a half sausage rolls couldn’t manage the last half”, or Andi Peters: “I am the voice of all the versions of the High School Musical 3 advert. Yippee.”
Then there are others who use it to promote “things of interest” – like websites, articles or photos. Likely lads are Adrian Monck and John Prescott. With this in mind, I send an “interesting” link to Reuters_Women – a pseudonymous twitterer in charge of International Women’s Day – to tell her about my university paper’s special feminist issue.
The third group use it – probably as it was intended – to write updates on what is actually happening in their life, especially if they are somewhere interesting or seeing something important. The perfect example is Robin Hamman who tweets: “I’m at Downtown Disney Marketplace”
He’s linked himself, via a program called Brightkite, to a map so his followers can see where he is.
Evidently, some are born tweeters, some become tweeters and some have twitter thrust upon them. I’m in the third camp.
Part of the problem is that I’m in college, which isn’t particularly exciting for me, and is even less exciting for people who aren’t me. I end up missing some of the half hour deadlines.
One advantage of half-hourly tweeting is the steady stream of amusing musings from other people. Be they unintentionally hilarious (Dean Gaffney: “@johnpmerrick you have the same name as the Elephant Man, but you arent [sic] him. Thats [sic] odd ! isnt [sic] the world a small place”) or genuinely tongue-in-cheek (Find Newsroom Quotes under newsrq: “Give me 20 seconds of degradation’ – TV sub to picture editor”)
I can see the value of the half-hour tweet if you’re at a protest, or a football match. If it’s an event to which you can add a personal spin, Twitter is great. The problem is that if you’re enjoying yourself tweeting about it is probably the last thing on your mind.
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