Why I Love Twitter

I admit it – I love Twitter.

Oh, if you don’t know what Twitter is, go have a look at my page - https://www.twitter.com/jamiewrites - it's pretty straightforward; basically, it’s a social network where you send and receive short message – very short messages; you’ve only got space for 140 characters in each message, called a ‘tweet’ – to (and from) the people who follow you (and those who you follow).

Anyway, it took me a while to get into it. I was first introduced to it by a friend, who waxed enthusiastic about how interesting it was, mostly because of Stephen Fry, Alan Davies and a few of the other first celeb twitterers. So, I signed up and had a glance; I wasn’t particularly impressed.

A few weeks later, however, I had some time on my hands so I did some searching to see who else was ‘tweeting’ and managed to come across the names of some people who I thought might be interesting – and found quite a few: broadcaster/comedian Russell Brand, musical comedy genius Tim Minchin, writer Neil Gaiman, Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson, magician Penn Gillette (of Penn and Teller), Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk, The Office (US Version) actor Rainn Wilson, 30 Rock’s Tina Fey, musician Amanda Palmer (Dresden Dolls), Heroes actor Greg Grunberg, Star Trek (can’t remember which one) actor Wil Wheaton and Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor.

This might seem like enough, but once begun, I found it was difficult to stop looking for more people to follow (as it is called). I just kept adding names.

It was at this point that things started to get a little weird – by which I mean people started following me. One of the things you do when you set it up is give it your email address; whenever someone starts following your tweets, it sends you an email. I don’t check that email address every day, so every day I would log on a handful of the new ones would be messages from Twitter telling me I had a new follower.

What I also did to improve the whole experience was install the Twitbin add-on for Firefox. As it is, a Twitter page opens like a normal webpage – but this means remembering to go back and check it from time to time. Twitbin makes a section of your window a tweet screen, meaning that you don’t need to do any clicking to see new tweets.

So, those are, I guess, the technical details – but I haven’t really explained what there is to like about it.

Well, being a wordy kind of person, I find the concept of trying to say clever, funny and interesting things with only 140 characters more than a little fascinating and - considering I’m the sort of person who will happily write thousand word emails without thinking about it - rather challenging.

That’s the tweeter talking. The tweetee is another story.

It’s basically a combination of entertainment and information. If the tweets themselves aren’t always inherently funny (and a heck of a lot of them are; some of these people are comedians and writers, after all) they provide a link to something interesting. A lot of the big news outlets (CNN, the BBC etc.) have feeds, and breaking news comes through Twitter a lot faster than it’s going to come through anywhere else.

Spending a lot of time at the pc is important for effective Twittering. It isn’t going to be as good for anyone who doesn’t spend at least a few hours at a time glued to the screen. I don’t have it at work, though part of me is quietly hoping they (the powers that be) will read some of the articles floating around that say that using such things at work actually increases productivity. But I’m not going to hold my breath.

Oh, I neglected to mention one important thing – it allows you to reply to messages. So, if (for example) Trent Reznor tweets about something, I can reply to it – and he’ll see what I’ve written. I think I’ve done that once, when he asked about ideas for cover songs to do at gigs.

He didn’t respond. But that’s not important right now.

What you can also do is ‘retweet’, which is repost the content of someone else’s tweet in your own. This is useful for links to other things; I do it from time to time, esp. for people who link to other things in their tweets - like David Mitchell (from Peep Show and That Mitchell and Webb Look) who links to his articles in The Guardian. Interesting news items are also handy for retweeting.

But the one retweet that made the whole thing just that little bit more surreal was when I retweeted a YouTube link from actor/comedian Kevin Pollak (The Usual Suspects, A Few Good Men) doing impersonations (the man does an even better Christopher Walken than Jay Mohr in that episode of The Simpsons where he reads from Goodnight, Moon; he also does a great Alan Arkin and William Shatner and can point his eyes in different directions a la Columbo) in his hotel room. I thought this was hilarious, so I thought I'd share it with my followers.

Imagine my surprise when, a little later, he (Kevin Pollak) retweeted my retweet on his own page and said hi – and joined my followers. Kevin bloody Pollak reads (well, sees; I couldn’t guarantee he actually pays that much attention) my inane comments and random blatherings.

So there you have it. Yes, I’m a Twitter tragic. And I plan to stay that way – as long as it’s there.