Why should I twitter?

I admit that I was not an “early adopter” of twitter.  I activated an account a couple of years ago, failed to see the point of it, and let it languish til about a month ago.  After having dinner with “a local twitter celebrity,” Joel_DiPippa, I decided to give it a second chance.  After all, listening to all of the buzz and chatter, there must be something to it. Right? 

Twitter’s learning curve is slightly higher than most web2.0 apps.  A quick search of my gmail contacts offered up 0 (zero) options.  Facebook only offered 3.  At this point I was seriously thinking about abandoning the account the same dark cave that holds my hotmail, myspace and fortunecity accounts in a digital dustbin.  I decided to look at the list of followers that Joel had to give me an idea of what to do.  I noticed a few that seemed like good choices: Wild Oats, various art and cultural institutions.  I limed the branches and loaded up on the feathered feeds.  

The tweets started to roll in.  A little at first.  I added the original sender on interesting retweets.  Soon I looked up and saw 120 unread tweets.  I’ve focused my follows now, with a little trial and error.  Sometimes it feels like I’m drinking from a firehose, but in the digital information age it seems too much is better than not enough.  I am impressed by the now-present-in-the-moment nature of the tweets.  The comments on the olympics were coming in real-time.   News on the earthquake broke well before you could see it on television.

The NYT ran an article that listed the same objection that I had to this whole twitter thing , namely “I have nothing to tweet about.”  The answer is simple: you don’t need to.  I am perfectly content to use twitter as a passive form of communication.  Speaking of the NYT, I’ve noticed that I have spent less time on that website.  The feeds have taken the best of what I am interested in and parsed out the nonsense.  I spend more time on “the guardian” Jpost, and various other websites that cater to my specific interests.  In short, I’m getting timely information, from a wide variety of sources delivered round the clock.  The media needs to wake up and realize the winds are shifting…..

Librarything

Just found this little gem. I’ve already added a few books to my queue following suggestions from fellow bibliophiles. It’s really worth the time to punch in the titles from your stacks as the website has many different features to help organize and glean information by studying the titles you already own.

Ten rules for writing fiction | Books | guardian.co.uk

Ten rules for writing fiction | Books | guardian.co.uk.

This is why I love twitter.  I would have never have run across this gem otherwise.