My Twitter Experience

I’ve been using Twitter for a couple months now. I was almost pushed into it by fellow co-workers. I had no real desire to disclose to the world what I was eating for dinner or what video game I was playing at the time. But after doing a little research I found that, if properly applied, I could use it and not divulge intimate details about my life to the world at large.
The thing about Twitter is that anybody can follow you if you let them and with ‘Lender’ in my screen name I get so many real estate and investment people following me it’s not funny. For me, I have no desire to follow thousands of people. There’s no way I could keep up with that many updates. As a matter of fact, I stopped following a couple of people because they constantly were ‘twittering’ and it got annoying. I try to keep the people I follow down to a select few that I’m either friends with, work with, are relatives or are interesting to me. Right now I’m following 28 people and 42 have followed me. Some of the people I’m following are: Newt Gingrich, William Shatner, Chris Coyer, NetTuts, Darth Vader (it’s funny!), Tony Robbins (eh, I like the guy. Very inspirational. Sometimes you need that.) and Sarah Palin.

For companies that are trying to establish a social presence or public personalities like celebrities or politicians I can see where it would be beneficial to have as many followers as possible. But on an individual basis I just can’t see broadcasting my thoughts and activities to people I don’t know and will never meet or talk to. I have put a Twitter widget on my site in the right column to keep visitors updated on my musings but it is mostly for professional reasons that I have done so. Since I am into Web Design I need to stay up on the latest and greatest technologies that are out there and sometimes just knowing about them doesn’t cut it. You’ve got to get your hands dirty and use them to find out what they are capable of. And, like it or not, we are in a social cycle where everyone (including businesses) are trying to take advantage of these social networks to get their messages and products out to the general public.

With that said, I still don’t have a Facebook account. I’ve held off on that but I’m not sure I shouldn’t at least set up an account to see what the different options are so that if a client or one of my managers asks me a question about it I can have an informed answer. I had a MySpace page for a short time but it got annoying when I was constantly getting friend requests from stupid people. So I deleted it.

Anyway, Twitter is the hot thing for a while. I’m interested to see if it sticks around for more than a couple years and what form it will evolve into then. Many companies are incorporating it into their sales and marketing strategies.