I’ve been using Twitter since March 2007. I’ll tell you why.
I started using Twitter because some friends I met online were using it and I was interested in trying something new. There were all sorts of new social networking tools around at the time – Facebook was still fairly new, MySpace was in full swing, Friendster was on its way out. It’s funny, actually, to think of the myriad of different social networking services that have come and gone in the past five or so years. Facebook has stuck, and so has Twitter.
Twitter is an online messaging service. It’s a bit like the status update aspect of Facebook. You have 140 characters to type a message that is then broadcast to all your Twitter friends. You can read the messages from the people you follow as well. Twitter posts are called tweets. Twitter people are called tweeps.
My first tweet was unremarkable: “I’m tweeting, dummy”. My most recent tweet was “I’m sore today after training last night”. It’s all pretty inane. And yet Twitter informs me that I have tweeted over sixteen thousand times. That’s a lot of chatter. So why?
Twitter keeps me in touch with my friends and what they’re up to. I can see where people are, who they are with, what they are doing, thinking about, struggling with. And my tweeps can read the same about me. I feel connected to this group of people because we share so much of our lives with each other. It’s the quickest, simplest, most interesting way I’ve found to interact with others online. I find it rewarding and satisfying.
Did I mention I’m quite nosy? And a bit of an over-sharer? Twitter is the perfect medium for someone like me.
You can find me over on www.twitter.com
The Secret Life of Bebe 