Hypocritical as it seems, I couldn't resist opening up a Twitter account after ranting about social media sites and smart phones yesterday. I actually had a Twitter account that I rarely used before. But it suddenly dawned on me that it could be an interesting experiment to tie one to my blog. And I have to admit I'm kind of beginning to get the hang of it (if not the purpose).
Near as I can figure, Twitter is for people who don't have the attention span that Facebook requires. This is not to say that Facebook truly requires any attention. It is basically a way to stay in touch with people without actually ever interacting with them. There is a ironic kind of beauty in that.
Twitter doesn't bother with niceties like sharing photos, lists, interests or terribly deep thoughts. It's more the place to share brain farts. And since brain farts like real farts shouldn't linger, you only have 140 characters at a time to spout whatever random thought you are trying to convey.
Just as Facebookers collect "friends," Twitterers compete to collect followers. Because the more followers you collect, the more connected you are apparently supposed to feel. God knows you want as many people as possible to smell those oh so fragrant brain farts I was referring to.
And similar to blogging where you link to other people's blogs with the expectation that they will link to yours and create this parasitic relationship, I get the impression that when someone "follows" your tweets, they expect you to follow theirs. This is not unlike two people farting in bed and holding the covers over their heads.
I'm really beating this brain fart analogy to death.
So far, I've confined my tweets to word play with the words "tweet" and "twitter." I'm not sure how long I can keep that up. Eventually I will likely have to resort to mind numbing tweets about having popcorn stuck in between my teeth and trying to dig it out with a ball point pen cap. Or I could resort to mobile tweeting and get into the TMI category while voiding myself in the restroom. I think I'll pass on that option.
Pass on that option...get it? I crack myself up.
Tweeting actually comes easy to me. I have always been a pretty decent headline writer. It stems from my days working on the college newspaper before the digital age made it possible to make even the longest headline fit in the smallest space. In the days of typesetting, you had to write the headline to fit. I also like puns, so hopefully I'll never have to truly resort to mundane or TMI tweets.
I'll save those pearls for my blog.
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