Friday Philosophy – OK, so I am on Twitter Now

Not a very exciting Friday Philosophy this week I’m afraid, just a self-publicising announcement that I am now on Twitter. I’ve put the wordpress widget on the blog for a while (days or weeks, I don’t know), my twitter name is MDWidlake. {I was a little surprised mwidlake had gone already but that says more about how rare I consider my surname to be than naivety, I hope}. It seems you can click on a part of the widget to follow me, which is a pretty safe thing to do as I am not very verbal as yet.

As I said, I’m not very active at the moment, I’m more following just a few friends and seeing what people use Twitter for. So far it mostly seems to be about:

• Random stuff posted when bored
• Complaining about work or, more specifically, tasks that are proving trickier than hoped
• Drinking
• Random stuff posted when bored
• Articles that have caught someone’s eye
• …or more often, about tweets about articles that have caught someone’s eye
• Chatty stuff that only makes sense between social peers (and isn’t that one of the main points of something like Twitter?)
• Random stuff posted when bored
• Cuddly toys. I think that is a result of low sample size and that Doug Burns is away at a conference. I worry about his sanity sometimes.

Niall Litchfield, Neil Chandler and Doug Burns were right {thanks again for your advice, gents}, there is some nice stuff on there and I’ve already seen some articles and web pages I found interesting via it – but I have also failed to get on with proper work-like stuff I should have been doing as a result.

I also like the chatty extension to real social engagement that Twitter gives but I hold out on my final decision as to whether this makes up for the negative impact it seems to have on real, meeting-in-person socialising.

The interface to Twitter seems a bit, well, rubbish to me. I know, I’ve been on there for all of a week and I am probably missing the Bleedin’ Obvious  but it seems the stuff I see in Timeline, the default view, is just a subset of what people I follow say. I suspect that it’s got something to do with whether the person the tweet is replying to is on my follow list. To understand half the social stuff you have to go clicking around on people’s full tweet history and follow the thread back. Surely there is an easier way than this, maybe some connect-by tree-walk SQL could be invoked…

I’ve already dropped one person off my “following” list. I only followed one celebrity and I decided I could live without the random musings of Simon Pegg. I can imagine people get addicted to following several dozen b to z level celebs, maybe it’s like constantly living in some sort of poor quality reality tv show {Personally I tend to avoid all reality TV, I prefer reality. Except that I am forced to watch that dancing thing on BBC by my wife. And like most men who make that sort of defence, I can’t quite explain away why I still watch it if she is away…}.

So, don’t expect too much in the way of interesting, witty, insightful or even existing tweets from me as yet, but if you want to follow, heck you can always drop me like a sack of manure any time you like :-).