On Feb 11 I made the spontaneous (and potentially premature) decision to stop twittering. Or let’s call it taking a serious break to re-evaluate. I joined Twitter during its geeks-only phase in April 2007 with the ground breaking statement “back to the office with Pascal” (what was your First Tweet?). I then let it rest for a year or so before picking it up once there were “enough people like me” on it. I ran several campaigns with it, including a gargantuan stream of more than 1600 tweets for Beck’s beer. And sat on the couch (among other places) staring at TweetDeck on my iPhone, trawling through links and private minutiae. And then I made this abrupt decision…which I promptly announced on Facebook. I couldn’t keep that to myself:
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Tim Buesing “just had a thought: how about I stop twittering? Would it even matter?”
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So except for a few automated tweets coming via my linked accounts of blip.fm, slideshare or this blog I have been silent.
- I don’t really miss it.
- Nobody has expressed missing me on there (so far).
- It seems like I wasn’t alone in giving up.
My TweetDeck columns
My “Industry” column inside Tweetdeck fell from about 30 active, daily twitterers (out of 65) to about 5 – 10. Events such AIMIA awards or AdTech give it a “real-time info” jolt but it still feels slower. And recent converts like ex-SMH’s TheRealSamNorth got christened at The Digital Citizen meetup and instantly slacked off as well. Admittedly, that’s all very anecdotal evidence. But the people still twittering are mostly senior agency people with a vested interest in keeping the Twitter conversation going.
Is Twitter going 180 degrees back to (social) geekdom? I am happy for you to call me a traitor and prove me wrong with (Australian) stats but does it only work for real-time events and breaking news?
Between 0 and 1 