Valhalla Island

I am a heavy Twitter user and aficionado. Never has a web application answered the needs I didn’t know I had so perfectly. The nature of simple applications like Twitter, a text box with a character limit, allows people adapt the service to almost whatever they want. The way I use it has very little to do with the question “what are you doing?”

I’ve done lots of writing about Twitter but I want to go into more detail.

Posting

Posting to Twitter is not a chore. I don’t feel an obligation to post and I’m never searching for something to post about. I don’t post to inform others, for publicity, self-promotion, to chase a larger followership or to spread the news. My motivation for posting to Twitter is entirely selfish, it simply feels good to get things out of my head.

If I have a thought, I post it and it clears the mind. Knowing that it’s broadcast to my followers and anyone else who wants to read it adds to the feeling of release. Writing things down on paper gets thoughts out of your head but they’re pushed straight into another closed store which is more like locking a thought away than setting it free.

The things I tweet about aren’t things I’d just tell people, they’re not things worth telling another individual and that’s one of the many beauties of Twitter — it’s possible that other people are interested in what you think, not that I care how interesting others find my Twitter posts but occasionally people reply. In my case, getting replies on Twitter is effectively getting replies to my thoughts which is a fantastic thing. If I’m thinking it I find it interesting by definition, posting to Twitter doesn’t just free thoughts but opens them to a potential discussion.

Again, I will say, if it wasn’t for Twitterific posting to Twitter would be too cumbersome to be enjoyable or effectively serve my purpose using Twitter.

Despite my high total number of Twitter posts I can go days with very few posts, not out of restraint but simply because not a lot is on my mind. That kind of activity happens usually in times when I’m procrastinating, I don’t like to use the word “bored” because at any time there’s a million things I could be doing but motivation comes and goes in waves. It’s times of low motivation and therefore low activity that results in low Twitter post frequency not just because I’m not doing anything but because I don’t have anything to think about.

When it may seem like I’m doing the least because I’m “spending so much time” posting is actually when I’m at my busiest and most productive. When my mind is racing, I’m noticing things, observing the way things are behaving, running into problems and solving them, dealing with people. Stimulation fuels thoughts which fuel Twitter.

To give you an example of how I post what I’m thinking rather than what I’m doing take this. I’m eating a pear, I could post “Eating a pear” or I could post what’s running through my mind at the time: “Eating fruit feels good to me beyond the taste and perceived health benefits — it feels like I’m eating nature.”

Animals think “I am running” or “I am hungry”, humans think beyond the physical. Mechanical actions are boring, real thoughts are interesting. That’s why I very rarely post things like “waking up” or “bed” because it’s just what I do and while it answers Twitter’s “What are you doing?” question, it’s not something I think about. Even though I’m a prolific poster my first posts don’t come until a couple of hours into my waking day when my brain is functioning smoothly. I feel no obligation or desire to post what I’m objectively doing.

Following

I find what you’re doing extremely boring. Whether I know you offline or not I just don’t care if you’re drinking coffee or you missed a bus or you’re listening to Zepplin. What I’m more interested in what you think or feel about the things that happen to you but often I don’t care about that either — if you really needed that coffee or you’re upset you missed your bus, that’s also uninteresting.

“Twitter in Plain English” by Common Craft explains Twitter like that, completely misses the mark for me and, I would guess, doesn’t make Twitter look all that appealing to non-users.

Like everything else on my computer, my feed subscriptions, websites I visit, the software I use, the people I follow have to constantly prove themselves to me. Not personally, begging for my followship but rather I’m always re-evaluating whether I’m enjoying this person’s updates or not.

Twitter feels very personal to me, I think it feels personal to a lot of people and that’s why, compared to other services, you see a greater percentage of real photographs as avatars. I like to read every update, when I follow a new person and their updates are too frequent and uninteresting I very quickly stop following. It’s hard for me to follow someone new because I’m extremely comfortable with the current people I follow and new, high quantity posters can make me feel assaulted on my own desktop. I don’t want to stop reading every update from the people I’m interested in.

The people I follow tend to be the same people I like in other mediums. I love Daniel Jalkut’s software, I love John Gruber’s website, I love Merlin Mann on Macbreak Weekly, I love following them all on Twitter.

Twitter’s API makes it easy to make applications that auto-post to your timeline. Because Twitter is so personal to me I don’t like auto-posting and follow (almost) no one that does. Even if I like your “real” posts, I’ll unfollow you if you auto-post. Even if you would manually post a link to every blog post you write and you want to automate it, I don’t like it. Manual posting shows you value the work enough to bring attention to it on Twitter. If you’re not excited enough about your latest blog post or Flickr photo that you lack the motivation to post it to Twitter, it doesn’t deserve to be posted to Twitter.

So that’s my Twitter strategy, not that I realised what I was doing until I really thought long and hard about it. I’ll leave you with my recommendations for people you may like to follow:

• Merlin Mann — His posts are tiny, 140 character works of art.
• Echuckles — The female equivalent of Merlin Mann.
• and Amy Jane — My most favourited Twitterer.