I was a late Tweeter primarily because on the face of it, I mistook it for just another social networking site. And boy was I wrong! It took me couple of days to get a hang of things and I still remember, in the first week, asking Kenney what an RT was, who was kind enough to patiently explain the concept of ReTweets. My understanding of RT was that if you don’t have anything else to say, you could look for some random Tweet that made some sense and RT them!
Well, once past that stage, I do confess that I thoroughly enjoyed using #Twitter. People began following me, I began following people. Since at work, I don’t have access to anything that’s even remotely tagged ‘social’, I usually come home and check the tweets in the nights. But by then, the fun would come to an end with bubbly people like @Svara wishing everyone a good morning about 10 hours back and bidding a goodbye two hours back or @kenneyjacob tweeting every possible move of his (he would be online all the time anyway)! I made my 200th tweet about 2-3 days back and I follow 25 people with 35 following me. That isn’t anything at all if you compare the numbers most people have.
For me it has never been about the numbers, but of quality of the responses and the experience. I usually have the habit of replying to every message, scrap or tweet shot at me. So keeping in mind the time constraints I have, I cannot insanely go on and follow every guy in the planet and lose track of everything! And since I hardly have anything interesting to say as these days I’m more into photography (check out this and this), the problem with the low number of followers is addressed. But again, what keeps me with twitter?
I am a space buff- anyone who follows me would vouch for that. I follow @NASA- the official NASA Twitter feed which would give out minute by minute updates whenever there was a shuttle up there or a spacewalk going on or of anything interesting. During STS-127 (Endeavor) , I was often hooked on to twitter to follow all that was happening in the orbit and when the Orbiter was on its way back home, I took the lead and tweeted live stats of the shuttle while following the events right from the de-orbit burn, on the NASA TV (online). Believe it or not, @NASA, #Twitter and an orbiter docked at the ISS make for a very interesting and exciting reason for me to follow Twitter. Other users I follow would include @Astro_127 (Mission Commander Mark Polanski) of the STS-127 who took the unprecedented step of being the first to tweet from space and @astro_tim (Col Tim Kopra) who joined the expedition 20 crew in the ISS on STS-127, became the first to tweet from the ISS.
Closer to earth, I enjoy following the diplomat @ShashiTharoor, who usually manages to find time to keep us, aam admi enlightened about the musings at the Government, @celestinechua who always has something pleasant to say about living a good life, @priyankarocks who never fails to amuse us with her regular doses of witty humor and not to mention @kenneyjacob and @Svara (you both have been already covered) and few more (sorry guys running out of space but you all are included). Twitter has somehow managed to maintain a strange intellectual appeal which I find very difficult to let go. So if I tweet tonight, it’s because of all this! What makes you tweet?
