Deb's SM Survey:

I’m not the most active Twitter user, but I love it. Twitter’s deceptively simple and easy to dismiss, but people have found some amazing uses for it.

One reason I love Twitter is the sense of virtual people watching. I’m following 95 people at this moment, most of whom I haven’t met in real life (yet). So my Twitter feed gives me snippets of their lives and their conversation, much as if we all frequented the same café every morning before work.

Unlike the café analogy, Twitter encourages me to join in the conversation and communicate directly with these other people (at least I’m less shy online than I would be in an actual café). The reciprocity of the relationship where Twitter users follow each other implies permission to interact in a way that merely buying a cup of coffee at the same counter doesn’t.

Since I’m not always online or actively engaged in the Twitter conversation, my Twitter philosophy of the moment is “If you can’t be useful, be funny.” I try to come up with a one-liner that will make the folks following me chuckle – and maybe, on a good day, laugh out loud.

Better jokes in response are always welcome. Follow me at http://twitter.com/DBS.

Update: Twitter user philosophizing must have been in the air, and I caught the tail end of the breeze. Paul Downey’s post of last Saturday “Are You a Twitter Twit or a Twerp “ is a must read. And don’t forget to follow the Twitter Ten Commandments.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Culture, Social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.