Digital Buzzard

To the left right of this post you’ll see my twitter feed – a stream of consciousness contained within 140 characters or less. I highly doubt there’s a connected person on the planet who hasn’t heard of twitter, especially considering the recent explosion in coverage on television, news mentions and the bloke who sits opposite who keeps telling you about his recent tweets and how @StephenFry once sent him a reply.

I’ve found that I gone through several phases of my twitter-use since signup:

1. Frequent tweeting, obsessive checking of my feed and @replies
2. Searching for ‘celebs’, adding them, and anyone else vaguely interesting
3. Trying out several desktop/iPhone clients, running 2 or three consecutively before settling on one.
4. Realisation that I can’t read the tweets of the 90+ people I’m following, and more importantly realising that I don’t want to
5. Frequency of tweeting drops off significantly, interest wanes
6. Unfollow the unknowns, the uninteresting and the silent twitterers
7. Start approaching a good balance of followers/tweets and begin to enjoy and use the service.
8. Blog about the above

I must admit that I’m fascinated by the mainstream coverage – the related vocabulary that is entering the public conciousness and the fact that @Oprah’s joining resulted in a 43% traffic increase. I knew she was big in the US, but that’s some power – if only twitter was selling ads against her pageviews.

Now to try the Tweetie desktop client: haven’t been able to sign in yet, but I see they’ve released a 0.1 update, so I’ll give it another go…