Tuesday 24th March 2009

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twitter social networking 300x200 My Love / Hate Use of Twitter (or How Twitter is Like Las Vegas)

I am active on Twitter. I post to Twitter daily. I have four different RSS feeds that add my blog content to Twitter throughout the day. I have about 400 Twitter followers and follow about that many people. I am starting to make use of Twitter clients and Twitter tools like TweetDeck. I link my Twitter account in various ways to other social networking sites that I’m on.

And yet, the fact of the matter is that I don’t love Twitter. Or maybe I do.

For the most part, I don’t enjoy Twitter. I don’t like the format that it’s in because it seems messy and complicated and overwhelming. Even with the use of Twitter clients, I don’t find Twitter to be friendly on the eyes (or the brain). I also don’t like that Twitter seems to be most effective as a tool for blog traffic if you’re following tons of people but that means that you’ve got to look at Twitter updates every few seconds because there are so many people posting all of the time.

But there’s definitely something that draws me to Twitter. It’s addictive. It’s interesting. I can see what people are thinking about all of the time. I get links to information that I wouldn’t otherwise have seen. I feel connected to the world around me by virtue of the fact that we’re chatting online even though I see a level of superficiality to all of that online communication.

You know, come to think of it, my love/hate relationship with Twitter is a lot like my love/hate relationship with the city of Las Vegas. I don’t like Las Vegas much. It’s overstimulating and overwhelming and superficial in so many ways. But I go to Vegas fairly often because it’s a convenient vacation, most of what I want from a trip can be found there and the benefits of traveling there sometimes outweigh the negatives of the experience. Now if only Twitter had showgirls and slots … you know, I bet if I looked around, it might.

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4 Responses to “My Love / Hate Use of Twitter (or How Twitter is Like Las Vegas)”

  1. sami says:

    Kathryn Vercillo http://hubpages.com/hub/20-Ways-to-Get-Followers-on-Twitter this hup is on first page on google good job how you do it?

  2. [...] had to do with Twitter. I’m interested by Twitter despite the fact that I have something of a love/hate relationship with the social networking site. I’m intrigued by how it is being used by different types of [...]

  3. I just gave up using Twitter actively. First of all, it became a time drain, trying to read all the entries of the people I am following. I prefer reading my favorite blogs in my RSS reader. Second, I don’t believe that you can say much in 140 characters; blogging is a much deeper connection with people. Third, Twitter doesn’t bring much traffic. For my blog it’s less than 10%. If I compare the time I spend to it, it doesn’t pay off. And last but not least, they removed two of my tweets, although I am one of the least active members, meaning that I’m not the killer spammer there :) I keep posting updates though, for the people that already know me from my blog, just for the sake of variety.

  4. Shell says:

    I was cracking up reading this! This is exactly how I feel, and I always compare it to Vegas. I don’t have twitter for fear of the addiction ( I figure, I am already sucked into facebook, I need to hold off).
    This is a great site!
    I come back soon!
    Come have a visit at my blog sometime :)
    ~Shell

    @Shell … Thanks. :) So is staying away from Twitter like staying away from the tables?

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