Got Caught in a Twitter Tornado Yesterday

I’m on my second week of a four week break from teaching. You gotta love that. But as I reflect back on my two week’s time, I’ve discovered that I’ve been working the whole time. Yep. I’ve been setting up my Blackboard courses and my course social network. I’ve been creating screencasts and podcasts. And I’ve been tweeting. It’s all been great fun! Really. It has. I love this stuff, so it’s not like work at all, especially if I don’t have to go anywhere.

Although yesterday was a blurr, and somehow I got wrapped up in a Twitter tornado and tweeted all day with people I don’t even know. Interesting. I don’t understand how people can follow hundreds of other people. That’s just plain madness. I’m having a hard time keeping up with the 23 I follow. Some are interesting, and others I’m still trying to figure out. Many have a goal of making the Twitterboard, which is a sign that you have lots of followers and you have lots to say to them. I’m more interested in finding an interesting comment or link to explore. But there is something intriguing about wondering who a person is, what they do for a living, where they live. I feel like a stalker. It’s weird.

My favorite twitterers are the ones who throw out a morsel of information here and there, yet remain mysterious to the public. I also like the twitterer who is doing something new and exciting online and sends a link to join or check it out. I’ve discovered a lot of new things online via Twitter this way.

I’m still trying to figure out how Twitter will work for me. I’ve tried the throwing out morsels rout and I’ve tried the chitchat rout as well. The latter is a lot of work, especially if you feel compelled to respond to everyone who posts something. Isn’t that what IM is for? I think of Twitter as more of an abstract conversation where people respond to a post, not directly, but indirectly with another post that might be similarly related. Yes, that’s it. That’s how I want to use Twitter.

So that’s not to say that I don’t enjoy the most prolific twitterers out there. They’re all quite amusing actually, but I can’t say that I can keep up. I just watch in awe as the stream of tweets continually scrolls up on my Twitterrific widget and the incessant bird chirp rings through the speakers. Madness.

Oddly my Twitter universe has been quiet this morning. Not many chirps. I guess these people do have jobs and really do work somewhere. I was wondering about that after yesterday. Many of the people I recently decided to follow are right here in AZ. They’ve even planned an AZTweetUp in January. http://TweetUpAZ.com I’m intrigued. Of course I’ll be there.

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