it’s my twitter, you twit!
Last night I came home to a very funny DM on twitter. Not “ha ha” funny, but “WTF?!” funny. A very rude twit by one of my “friends” having a go at me for using greek and greeklish in my twits and basically about my posting about what I am doing “and nothing of any value to anyone” as he put it. My first reaction was to mentally flick the middle finger to them, secondly to unfollow them and lastly to have a little rant on twitter myself.
When I later calmed down his message got me thinking. I’ve been using twitter since 20 March 2007. Not that it was such a memorable day tbh but tools like whendidyoujointwitter.com will tell you when you joined. At the time I was following a few people I knew personally or from t’internets and some companies I was interested in but that was pretty much it.
That was way before twitter was the envy of every kid on the internet playground, before everyone and their dog [literally] had an account, before every company wanted to be on twitter and everyone had to have a twitter presence. Before nearly everyone became a social media consultant and tried to push their product in my twitter face.
That was even before twitter itself decided to reinvent and repurpose it’s service to be a marketing tool, a realtime information tool and search engine or whatever people are using it for these days.
You may call me a purist, you may say I’m stuck in my ways, you can even say that you can’t teach an old bitch (moi) new tricks (twitter usage). I do however miss the days that twitter was all about “what are you doing”.
Although a lot of the tweets were trivial and boring you got to know others in ways they wouldn’t normally present themselves, in their blog for example. You got to know what they were really interested in whether that was chocolate chip ice cream or internationalization in ruby. The things that got them really hot and bothered, excited or angry enough to tweet without waiting to write a lengthy blog post or send a chain email. You found interesting, to you, people from replies and conversations people where having and you built a network based on common interests or because you knew common people. The spam bots where few, the shameless promotion minimal and if you had 300 followers you probably hadn’t “bought” them through some pyramid scheme.
Honestly I don’t have issues with how people use twitter. I myself use it for information, for mini chats, for status updates on services but most of all I use it to let people know “what I am doing”. The power of twitter is that you can follow who you want and equally block who you want. You can have your twits public but you can also keep them private for you and the people you want. It can be personal, it can be a marketing tool, it can be plainly a means of spam.
If however you get in my face with your millions of links, the incessant spam or constant self-promotion I will stop following you. Why? Simply because I can. I won’t harass you about it, I wont even let you know that I stopped following you.
If you think that my twitting is just noise in your feed you are free to do the same to me. But the bottom line is you don’t have to be rude about it or tell me that I’m not using twitter “the right way”. Cause baby it’s my twitter and I’ll keep telling the world “what I’m doing”. Cause that’s my way and it’s my way or the highway!
Comments
WTF! You have a mighty interesting Twitter feed - more interesting than others I can’t find myself to unsubscribe from anyway!
DM me with his name :P
P.S. Purist here, too. Remember the time when we first started as Twitterers? Fun!
It was fun wasn’t it? And the network we initially built was very interesting, at least for me.
People published truly unique stuff and not trending topic, RTs where honest, conversations more personal and discovering new people was a fun game.
So miss it!