So: Twitter. I’ve decided to take a second crack at it. I’ve had an account for quite a while, but the problem is that most of the time I forgot all about it and never wrote any updates. However, being the dork that I am, I concluded that if technology was the problem, then technology could be the answer too. So I downloaded a copy of TweetDeck and set it up. It works pretty well and offers some nice convenience features (multiple columns, real-time link shortening, easy replying/retweeting/etc.), but the main thing it does is pop up a little box on my screen whenever a new tweet arrives. Benefit: I always remember Twitter is around. Drawback: little boxes are constantly popping up on my screen.
I dunno. Is this how it feels to be eighteen in 21st century America? With a screen constantly full of things demanding attention: email, Twitter, Facebook, IM, etc.? (Except no one uses email anymore, do they? Instead they use the unbelievably primitive messaging functions built into apps like Facebook and Twitter, which feels to me like going back to the days of dial-up.) Maybe. I imagine I’m just getting a small taste of it, though.
Still, so far, so good. TweetDeck forces me to pay attention to Twitter, and this inspires me to tweet more often. Whether that’s a good thing or not remains to be seen, but it doesn’t really seem to be interrupting my concentration or anything. And it was pretty handy for following the chaos of the final day of the Copenhagen conference. Plus there’s another bonus: Twitter seems to be generally friendlier than the blogosphere. You really can’t get a good rant going in 140 characters, so you mostly get snark and wittiness instead. That’s actually kind of a nice break.
Next step: build up the list of people I follow, which is currently a ramshackle of random names. Next step after that: get a new picture.
