My Experience on Twitter

Well Twitter as been rather uneventful since the beginning of this project. I’m not the type of person to socialize online and while I have adapted to Facebook rather well I have not had the same connection with Twitter.

So far I have committed just enough time to complete the weekly blog posts to this project. This isn’t because I don’t want to do this project; this is because I find it difficult to go out of my way in order to use Twitter. To me the networking site seems like a crappy version of Facebook in that less people use it and it’s more convoluted. It’s pretty easy to just hop on over to Facebook and check out a few updates while on Twitter it takes more time and I feel like I have to search through it more.

I also find that a lack of normal people to follow make it a little overwhelming. Most famous people, politicians and news sites are up to date on all the jargon and etiquette used on Twitter so sometimes their posts can be over the top.

For instance, the image below is a snapshot of Lady Gaga’s Twitter page. 

While it is quite obvious she is talking about shows in her tour for one tweet the others are rather confusing. The first and third tweet in the feed use the "@" symbol to tag another user into the tweet. I know for me this was very overwhelming at first because stars and talk show hosts use it a lot to talk about people they might have had on their show or gone to an awards event with. Also, being Lady Gaga, she says stuff and uses words or phrase not normally thought of by the non-follower. An example would be that she calls herself the “Mother Monster” and her followers are her “monsters”.

At this point I don’t really “use” Twitter in the conventional way so frequency of usage is hard to judge. I don’t tweet or get updates on my phone, I kind of just observe and look up interesting news stories that Time.com or CNN post on their Twitter feeds. I only have 5 followers (I believe only one of which is someone I actually know) so tweeting seems like a waste of time when an updated status on Facebook will get a lot more recognition. Overall I’m probably on Twitter one to three times a week.

 

I probably won’t continue to use Twitter after this assignment is over. Like I said, I’m not big into using networking sites other than Facebook (and even that is rather sparingly compared to most young adults). While I will not continue to use Twitter I have found this assignment very insightful. I mean just because you don’t always use something doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know how it works. Knowing the layout and workings of Twitter could conceivably be useful at some time in my future.