To tweet or not to tweet
Posted by Cassandra | Filed under Uncategorized
To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question.
When I got out of bed this afternoon (yes, as in after noon), I checked my Facebook and found that one of my friends from high school, whom I respect and miss her sarcastic sense of humour dearly, had this to say about Twitter in her Facebook status:
twitter is the product of a narcissistic self-indulgent generation. it only promotes this idea of self importance.
I don’t know many people in real life who actually use Twitter, and there are definitely no mutual acquaintences of ours that I know of who use Twitter, so her comment surprised and offended me a little.
After we had commented back and forth a few times, I really took it personally when she said,
I think it just says a lot about yourself that you’re willing to sign up to a program that is used solely to tell people about the mundane things you do during your day.
So far, I’ve tweeted 177 times since the beginning of August. It’s not a lot, but I’m still trying to figure out how to best use Twitter.
I don’t go tweet crazy like someone I added recently, who updated more than 50 times in one day! Needless to say I stopped following her not only because of the sheer number of tweets, but also because I had no idea what she was going on about half the time.
I hope to one day use Twitter to promote my “brand,” or to spam thousands of followers with my latest blog update, or to even find a job, but, for now, everyone is stuck with boring old me.
I take issue with the idea that Twitter is only used as a means to broadcast minute-by-minute updates of my life. I get much more value out of Twitter than I put into it, and I think that’s probably true of most Twitter-ers. For example:
- I get notifications from @ttcupdates about the status of the TTC (assuming the TTC puts the information out there)
- I can ask questions about the stories I’m working on and probably get an answer right away
- People I follow post links or re-tweets to interesting content I wouldn’t have found on my own
- Huge (global) news stories hit Twitter before I see them anywhere else
One only has to look at how Twitter affected the information flow coming out of the Mumbai attacks to see the larger value of it. People were tweeting first-hand experience as it happened and the whole world was reading in disbelief.
It may not be better than a traditional media account of the events, but it’s something totally different and captures a moment in time in a way that a newspaper article or a two-minute news broadcast never could.
Although there are apparently only six million users on Twitter right now, that number is likely to grow. As it does, the opportunity to crowdsource events big and small are going to become even more evident. Why refresh a news organization’s homepage for the latest news when it will inevitably pop up on your desktop or cell phone at the same time, or even before? I guess newspapers are catching on to a certain extent, but it’s not the same as hearing it in a tweet from someone you know.
Why do you tweet? If you don’t, why don’t you?
I'm a writer and editor just starting my career at 
February 4th, 2009 at 9:16 pm
Thanks for linking to TTCupdates, Cassandra! It’s great to see some fellow journalists blogging and posting to Twitter. To answer your question, I tweet to connect with other people in the Toronto tech community, to meet new people, and to learn new things. It’s all about the connections.