A few months ago, I announced that I was going to do a test-run with Twitter. So now I thought I'd share a few thoughts. Probably the most telling bit of evidence that shows how my test of Twitter went, is that I haven't posted anything to my Twitter account since December 5th, a whopping 3 weeks after I started, and two and a half months ago. It was at that time also that I stopped reading tweets with any degree of regularity.
It's not that I think Twitter is evil or utterly banal (although some of the users may be) it's just that I couldn't seem to make it fit into my life very well. Maybe I'm just getting old, I am now in the "over 40" crowd, but I had a helluva time keeping up on reading posts, and I was only following about 25 people. I don't know how anyone follows hundreds of people and actually gets anything else done, like holding down a full-time job and a family. Granted, I mostly was using my cell phone, and I know there are a lot of little apps out there that I could use to do my twittering on my PC, but frankly, the last thing I want while I'm in the middle of work, focusing on a programming or management task is to keep getting distracted by tweets popping up on my PC screen. Heck, it's bad enough all the distractions that email from coworkers causes.
It was fun to tweet from the PASS Community Summit and read some others' tweets while I was there, but looking back, I can see that a lot of the tweets were duplicates of others, especially during the Keynote addresses each morning. And since I was sitting there watching the keynote (as well as adding to the redundant rebroadcast) it wasn't very valuable.
Now, maybe if I was a professional journalist, I would find Twitter to be a valuable source of leads or commentary. Or maybe if I was trying to market my company, it would be a good way to get the word out and let people know what we were doing. But for where I am in life right now, not so much. The one Twitter account that got my attention recently, was the SQLTeam one where Graz has posted several tips, and maybe I'll get hooked again some day with a differently targeted group to follow, and, well, I'll keep my Twitter account in case I want to get back into it, but for now I don't plan to update it very often.
posted @ Saturday, February 21, 2009 5:24 PM