When’s your Twitterversary? If you tweet, what has your time a-tweeting meant to you? Is it a love thing? And is it possible to tire of the conversation that never sleeps?
The seven year itch describes a moment seven years into long-term relationships when cracks start to appear. In terms of my Twitter life, what we might call the seven year Twitch should be kicking in right now.
This weekend sees my seventh Twitterversary. It was way back on 17January 2009 that I first signed up for Twitter. As must be the case for many people, I was inspired to take the plunge by Stephen Fry. I kept seeing mentions of something called “Twitter” in his blog posts, and decided to investigate. I had no idea just how much Twitter would have to offer, what an impact it would have on my life. And I certainly had no idea that as a direct result of joining Twitter, I would actually get to meet Mr Fry later that same year (that tale is recounted here) nor receive a tweet from him a few years later.
So what is Twitter all about? Here’s a nice take from Wired.com:
“Twitter isn’t about a 140-character limit. It’s not about a timeline. It’s not about your joke going viral, or getting Justin Bieber to follow you by any means necessary. It’s about a single question, the one you see when you first load twitter.com: ‘What’s happening?’”
Twitter is just a medium. There is no right way or wrong way to use it. There were 307 million monthly active Twitter users in the fourth quarter of 2015. There’s no reason to doubt that each of those 307 million users (or at least the ones that aren’t bots) gets something entirely individual out of their Twitter use.
How Twitter opens up this world
Through Twitter you can have access to and interact with people whose paths you might otherwise never have dreamed of being able to cross. I genuinely can’t believe the heroes of mine with whom I’ve had (admittedly minor) interactions because of Twitter. As mentioned above, through Twitter I got to meet Stephen Fry back in 2009, and received a tweet from him in 2014. A few months ago, Gene Simmons of Kiss RT’d a tweet of mine to my good friend Sarah Miller, which fair – as they say – blew my mind (see image below). Just this past week, none other than the mighty Chuck D of Public Enemy actually started following me …and just yesterday Ice-T himself “liked” a tweet of mine (see image below the Simmons pic)! What living hero of yours would you most like to get in touch with? Twitter might just be able to make it happen…
Pictorial evidence of the @GeneSimmons RT:
Pictorial evidence of the @MrChuckD follow and the @FinalLevel (Ice-T, in other words…) RT:
To Twitter, thank you for all you’ve given me over the past seven years. To my Twitter friends, thank you for all the wonderful friendship and interaction these past seven years.
No seven year Twitch for me. Here’s to the conversation that never sleeps!*
Footnotes
* My good friend Mervyn Dinnen – who was possibly the first person to interact with me on Twitter and definitely the first Twitter friend I met in real life – coined the wonderful phrase “the conversation that never sleeps” to describe what social media is all about in a 2010 blog post.
Image… and very simple competition!
- The Marilynful image at the top depicts my BFI membership card. Let’s have a very simple competition! I wonder, gentle reader, if you can figure out the relevance of an image of Marilyn to the title of this post. Clue: It shouldn’t require much in the way of lateral thinking. Warning: There may not be a prize involved in this most simple of competitions!
MJCarty 