Twitter has a lot of friends for a 5 year old. On Saturday, I found myself having one of those conversations I have, maybe twice a week for the past year or two: “What IS Twitter, anyway?” asked my mother, even though I’ve shown her a number of times.
The next question, from someone else at a family gathering, was inevitable: “But why do you want to read about what someone had for breakfast?”
And then my ears fell off.
I use Twitter a lot (you can see how I use it by following me here) – to entertain and inform myself, to keep track of my favourite news sites, websites and blogs and to share links to Mamamia posts. I don’t follow celebrities. I don’t follow many people who tweet about their breakfast – but you can do either or both of those things if you wish.
For me, Twitter is a time saver. Instead of visiting 100 sites, I ‘follow’ them which means when they (like me) post links to their stories, I can skim and choose the ones I want to read. Here is a good time to tell you that if you don’t have Tweetdeck (or another of the Twitter platforms that are like a dashboard and make it far easier to use Twitter) you’re wasting your time.
Download it for free here and then open it on your desktop in the same way you’d open your browser or any other app on your desktop.
Look, basically, Twitter is whatever you want it to be. By following whoever you’re interested in (Kardashians, chefs, news sites, craft people, mummy bloggers, bands…) you can customise your Twitter experience exactly to your liking.
New to Twitter? This site helps summarise what it’s all about.
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Anyway, it’s probably a good time to tell you that Mamamia now has 7 different Twitter accounts that you can follow.
I will still be tweeting from my personal account (here) but because some people like to receive extra content about specific areas of interest, we’ve broken it up. ALL accounts are tweeted by real people, not robots and I’ve listed next to each one who will be tweeting it so feel free to interact with them.
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Top Comments
I am not a twitter follower and frankly, couldn't be less interested in it
In fact I find the whole twitter/facebook phenomena really intersting because I feel like they're geared towards getting a quick "bite" of info, rather than a full, satisfying meal.
I don't use twitter and I am an infrequent visitor to faceboonk, because to be frank, I really don't care that someone's out shopping or baking a cake or heading to work or whatever.
I'm also not interested in these quick so called updates or snapshots of news/stories. I want to be able to absorb the information and reflect on it. Some of this stuff isn't for skimming over and requires a lot more attention than a quick catch up.
There is so much information out there now I find it hard to believe that anything, even twitter, can help you really keep up with it.
Maybe I am a spectator (Kate Hunter comment) because I am just not interested. In fact I'm not that interested in a lot of the electronic gadgetry that's around at the moment. I like books, not a cold hard gadget to read from and I like to have conversations with my friends face to face and not via a keyboard.
Having said all that, if someone else wants to embrace every form of the new technology on offer, then I say go for it. But there will, eventually, be consequences and I'm not so sure those consequences will be for the better.
Hi there :)
I love books too and would never read one from a screen. Couldn't, wouldn't do it. But I must say Twitter is far more than just skimming. The main function of Twitter is as a messaging service. You don't read your news ON Twitter so to speak, but people summarise a story on it and then provide links to thousands of articles. Millions. On the SMH, BBC, Al Jezeera, anywhere they want. The beauty of it is that the people you choose to follow will have interests similar to you and every day, every minute you get fascinating, wonderful links on a wide range of subjects delivered directly to you...with minimal work :)
It's brilliant.
Hi Rick. I take your point. I know with only 140 characters or so you can't get much of anything really, but where do you find the time to do all this connecting? Where do you find the time to work out which of those thousands or millions of articles is/are the ones to read?
I use a computer at work but most of my time is spent working, not here on this site or any other for that matter and as for my weekends and down time, I can think of nothing worse than to be constantly checking a darn phone or whatever, to see what someone thinks I might be interested in.
I just think we rely too heavily and are too keen to embrace the latest gadget on offer, but like I say, everyone who thinks differently to me, then go for it.
I am a twitter fan. You can keep up to date with lots of people and organizations.Tweet deck allows you to easily follow and group what you are most interested in and it is so easy to reply and re-tweet. I have connected with some really great people all around the world.
Great post Mia.
And for the record I tweet about how to stay healthy
@drjoesDIYhealth