How and why I Twitter: part 1

By kate on December 2nd, 2007

I resisted Twitter for a long time because I couldn’t understand the appeal. It was only after I sort of backed into it that I fell in love. This is the three-part story of how that happened, why I love it, and some of the behind-the-scenes mechanics of how I configured it all.

It started with Facebook. When my previous employer launched a partnership with Facebook, I and everyone else in the company jumped into Facebook to see what all the fuss was about. This gave me an instantly large network of friends there, and that made Facebook stick. I enjoyed checking the news feed to see what everyone was doing, and who they were befriending. Eventually, I realized that my favorite part of Facebook is the status updates. If you’re not familiar with Facebook, the status update is a short field that you can edit that begins with your name (for example, “Kate is looking forward to soccer tonight”). It’s not just used literally for announcing your status, but for any short message you’d like to convey.

Then a few of my former colleagues became disenchanted with Facebook and began using Twitter instead. (Twitter is a website based around sharing only such short status updates.) I realized I also had some non-Facebook friends who had been Twittering all along. So, I began using Twitter as well to interact with those people. At first, I used Facebook as an entry point, but Twitter slowly won me over. Now, I read and write status updates through Twitter and they get sent to Facebook automatically (more on the details of that later).

Twitters and Facebook status updates are almost the same thing. But Twitter offers the ability to directly respond to someone else, either publicly or privately. And that simple extra feature is enough to make me prefer Twitter.

At first, I tried to update my status (in Facebook) once a day so it wouldn’t seem stale. Once I got in the habit of updating, I updated probably 2-3 times per day on average. After moving to Twitter, my frequency picked up a bit because I’d sometimes respond to other twitters as well as posting my own. Now that I’m fully addicted, I’m still not broadcasting everything. I range from 3-5 twitters on most days, less when I’m sitting around the house, and more when I’m out and about.

Checking Twitter is another story. I probably do that at least four times an hour. Why? Come back tomorrow for part 2 of this series.

Filed under: meta, relationships, technology

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One Response to “How and why I Twitter: part 1”

My Name Is Ruby » Recent Twitters about Ruby Says:
May 8th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
[…] and I both Twitter, and although we’ve decided not to set up a separate Twitter account for Ruby, we tweet about […]