Everybody lies

posted on Thursday, April, 16th, 2009 in Thursday Thirteen

13 things I learned about Twitter since signing up 4 days ago

For months I have been watching the phenomenon of Twitter from the outside, absolutely not getting what the fuss was all about. The whole thing seemed like a complete waste of time to me. After all, who should be interested in hourly one-sentence updates on what I am just doing? Or anybody else, for that matter? Few of us lead such an interesting life that it would merit such updates.

But a few days ago I finally succumbed to the peer pressure (mainly from Grace …) and thought, what the hell, if I want to go on making fun of the thing I should better go and give it a try first.

Here is how it went:

When I tried signing up the first thing I learned is that some … person had already taken my name. *fume* In case you didn’t know already: my chosen online name pretty much everywhere is samulli. I do have a few others that I use on sites I don’t want to have associated with that identity, but samulli should only be used by me. I get very irate when I see someone else use that name. And even more so when said “person” just blocks the name by signing up to a service and then goes on blatantly not using it. *grrr argh*

So, lesson 1 would be: I should have just signed up to this Twitter thing months ago, if only to make sure I secure my actual name.

Since I wanted to at least have samulli be a part of my name, I chose to sign up as “samullidesign” instead. It’s far from perfect, but I actually had a reason for choosing this particular handle. More on that in a couple of weeks or so.

Nevertheless, I should have come up with a shorter name, because the more characters your name has, the less people have left for writing the actual messages when they send you @replies.

Lesson 2: Choose your name carefully, make it as short as possible.

After I signed up I was sitting there with a “now what?” feeling. I didn’t have much of an idea what to do next.

The clever thing to do is of course adding people to your “following” list so that you can read what they are tweeting about. The problem is finding them, because on the actual Twitter site there is – at least as far as I have been able to find – no central directory where you can look for people. Sure, there’s the Find People page, but that only helps when you know exactly who to look for. I had rather wanted to look for like-minded people or something.

Since that option wasn’t immediately available I looked up some online friends and added them and then went through my RSS reader and added a lot of the authors of blogs I subscribe to. That gave me about 25 people to follow right there.

Then I got the idea to look up whom the people I follow follow themselves. Chances are when they find them interesting for some reason, so might I. Of course I might unfollow some of them in the future if it turns out I was wrong, but for now I am just interested in finding people.

That gave me about 30 more names. And, as a side-effect, it made me realize how many celebrities are on Twitter as well.

So, the next thing I did was looking up some of those actors, actresses and, most importantly, authors that I am a fan of. And honestly, that’s the thing that actually sold me on this whole Twitter gig. Yes, I am that shallow.

How cool is it that I can actually talk to my favorite authors or actors in real time? Very. True, some of them might turn out to be not half as interesting in person as they seem on TV or through their books, but that’s a risk I am willing to take.

Here are some examples of who I am talking about:
Felicia Day – she was the first one I knew to have a Twitter account
Alysson Hannigan (Denisof)
Nathan Fillion – he finally signed up after Felicia badgered him, I hope he really gets into it like she has

Greg Grunberg
Neil Gaiman
Stephen Colbert
Joe Hill
Steve Buscemi – he is very active and fucking hilarious

Michael Marshall Smith – he is also very active and he also has a new blog with a couple of fantastic posts
Stephen Fry
Kevin Spacey
Hugh Jackman

Of course, now I already hear some of you saying “How do you know it’s really them and not some impostors?” It’s the internet after all, you can never be entirely sure of anything here. Contrary to all appearances even I myself could be a slightly overweight, almost middle-aged spinster who lives more or less online, because she doesn’t have any real friends … oh, wait.

Anyway, to get back to the point: Of course I can’t swear to it, but in the cases I linked to I am pretty sure (98%) that all of them really are the people they claim to be. And if they’re not, they are at least very adept at impostoring and in many cases damn entertaining, so I am ok with it either way.

Now if only Felicia could badger Joss Whedon, Alan Tudyk and Summer Glau into signing up on Twitter I would be perfectly happy.

After adding quite a few people to my following-list I noticed within the first 24 hours after signing up that my followers count grew quite a lot as well. Which was not totally unexpected, because many people tend to add you right back when they see you added them. Funnily, many of my new followers weren’t on my following list, nor did I have any idea who the hell they were.

Turns out that , as far as I can see, many people who mainly use Twitter as a marketing platform, follow newbies in the hopes of having them follow right back to extend the reach of their network. Nothing to say against that per sé, but I chose in most cases not to add them, because I am just not interested in what they are tweeting about. So I guess they won’t be following me for long either, but I can live with that.

Since I didn’t want to hang around all day on the Twitter website, but on the other hand wanted to keep an eye on the conversations I looked around for some desktop applications or similar stuff that I could use. Turns out there are literally dozens of different programs and Firefox Add-ons and whatnot out there. There is Thwirl, TweetDeck (that seems to be the most widely used one), Tweetie (an iPhone app), Twitterific (ditto), EventBox (that seems to be exclusively for Mac), Seesmic Desktop, TwitBin (a Firefox Add-on), and probably a lot of others.

I am using TwitBin for now and it works just fine. It resides in a sidebar inside the browser, which I have open all the time anyway. It doesn’t have a wealth of options, but that’s exactly what I like about it. I can read the public streams, my direct messages and my @replies. That’s all I want for now. Later on, when I follow a lot more people, I might give TweetDeck a try as I hear it has a lot more options to group streams etc.

Another thing that I did on the second day already was customizing my profile. Since I always like to make things a little more personal and the standard backgrounds all looked quite boring to me this was a no-brainer. After all, who wants to use the same background as half a million other people? It was also pretty easy since you don’t have all that much room to work with anyway, so there’s no room for elaborate designs.

After now 4 days using Twitter I am slowly getting the hang of it and I even understand the appeal – up to a point. I can at least say one thing for sure: Whoever said that it can get addictive definitely wasn’t kidding. So be warned. It is very easy to waste an appalling amount of time with this stuff.

But it is also kind of fun, even if you’re – like me – not writing all that much yourself.

If you find people who share your interests it can be very interesting at times, because contrary to what I used to believe a lot of people don’t actually use Twitter as an “update on what I am doing”-application anymore, but instead share links to various interesting blog posts, resources and other stuff or discuss the problems they encounter in their work (all right, maybe that’s mostly the webdesigners, since they are working on their computers and online all day anyway). So all this can be not only an interesting and entertaining waste of time, it can sometimes actually be a lot of help when you’re stuck on something and can ask for help.

All in all I have to admit that my opinion about Twitter was quite wrong. It is hard to see from an outsider’s perspective, but the whole thing does actually have its merits and even though I won’t probably become a power user, I do finally get the point of it and I can understand why it has become so popular.

So, in case I have unwittingly convinced you to sign up and try it out, too, I’d be more than happy to follow your adventures. Either leave a link to your profile in the comments or follow me directly here.

And if you want to check out other Thursday Thirteen posts, head on over to the new T13 headquarters and either play along or read other people’s posts.

(icons via Creative Nerds)