Nov 22 2008
Twitter — Tweet, Untweet
I had doubts about using Twitter for networking and getting readers for my blogs, but I succumbed to some enthusiastic users, and signed on. Today, I’m signing off. Using social networks of any kind has been painful for me, and a waste of time. I gathered that Twitter might be different, but in its essence, it’s no different.
Two principles lie behind social networks. They allow you to link up with old friends and find new friends. And there’s the catch. If you don’t have any friends, and I don’t necessarily consider internet or real-life acquaintances my friends, then your only option is to find new ones. And that means very much the same thing it means in real life: hanging around the fringes where people gather, and asking to be friends with them.
It takes time to find potential friends, in the first place, and since the setting is completely artificial and everybody knows exactly what the goals are, the very meaning of “friend” is subverted and falsified. The people you meet aren’t friends; they’re contacts. The purpose of these sites is to allow people to make use of each other, and as old-fashioned as it might make me, that goes completely against my personal ethos.
Twitter has the additional burden of being an incredible time-waster. I started by following a few people who extolled the wisdom of using it in moderation. Yet, between them, they post dozens of tweets a day, most of them the very kind of personal stuff I have no interest in. Links to sites aren’t described and are further obscured by tinyURL. Just how many of these am I willing to click on to find out if they contain something useful or interesting? None, thank you. They’re no different from the nameless, descriptionless links people post in their blogs, or the Youtube clips with no more hint than “I really got a kick out of this. You have to watch it.”
With just three people to follow, my page is filled with dozens of items a day. What would it be like if I followed even more people? How does one even find the time to follow dozens of people and their twittering? It boggles my mind. If that’s what it takes to build readership or find useful information, thanks, but no thanks. I’ll do it the very old-fashioned way: one person at a time.
And then there’s Entrecard, which I’m still debating.
3 Responses to “Twitter — Tweet, Untweet”
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I signed up with tweeter ages ago but only recently starting using it because I too got harrassed into it. I have the same issue as you I am not very social in the real world and very few of my real friends have got past email anyway. I do have a bunch of “fans” at hubpages and they were the people I started following. Part of the problem is that english needs some new words for “people you know on the internet and partly trust” and “people you know on the internet and totally trust” those are the people who I follow on twitter and we are all to some extend trying to make some money form the internet. I have had to odd person do all the minutae of life stuff but not as much as I feared.
Entrecard I am finding a bigger time waster than twitter but its bringing more traffic so i am sticking with it at the moment - and it is a good way to find new blogs you might actually want to read!
I’ll probably give Entrecard a try, but the idea of leaving 300 cards a day is ridiculous. I don’t read that many blogs in a day, and most of them wouldn’t be interested in my blogs, anyway. I’m not going to around and drop cards on complete strangers who have nothing to do with my topics, in the hope that they’ll come by and read. From what I’ve read about it, there’s an awful lot of hit and run, so a lot of the traffic you get doesn’t develop into anything permanent. The problem with both Twitter and Entrecard is that so many people overuse them that they become a tremendous waste of time.
I have been using Twitter for a while, but I don’t get very many readers from twitter at all. I describe my links with the headlines to my articles, but I guess people either don’t find them interesting or are too busy doing their own thing. I think if you use twitter or another social networking site, it is best to both post your links and to read others blogs occasionally. I don’t think many people using the networks think similarly, though.
I haven’t used Entrecard, but I am giving it some thought.
Sierra
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