Twitter.

I’ve been using Twitter for a little while now, and I still don’t know what to make of it. On the face of it, it’s a bit useless, but addictive. As a social networking thing, it doesn’t work for me because I’m not that social and the ‘network’ is almost 100% one-sided. I have only 18 followers and I’m not famous enough to have any more. I wouldn’t even know how to whore myself out to get more. I don’t even really want any more.

(@ChrisDWelsh by the way)

I ‘follow’ (which sounds very stalkerish) quite a few people, but most aren’t interesting. There are only a handful of people who actually make it worth your time. Yet I follow more than that because otherwise it would be very boring. To make Twitter worth your time, you have to spam yourself with shit you don’t care about. I follow Hugh Hefner for fucks sake, who gets creepier and creepier with every missive. He can just say something along the lines of ‘I am watching a movie’, and it’s suddenly creepy because you know he’s sat watching it whilst surrounded by identikit ‘bunnies’ who are there out of some misguided attempt to become famous. You know that, after watching the film, this very old man will be fucking the brains out of at least one 18 year old. Or so I assume. It’s creepy, yet I can’t unfollow him for some reason. It’s like a horrific train wreck that I just can’t tear my eyes away from. Maybe I find it all life affirming – proof that just being rich, famous and very lucky with women does not make you any less of a terrifying person when you hit 80.

Occasionally, I update my own Twitter. I send a ‘tweet’ out to the 18 people who follow me, saying something like ‘Oh shit, I forgot I could update this thing…’. I have nothing interesting to say on there, that wouldn’t be put to better use on Facebook where some other bored nerd might pick up on it. The people who follow me on Twitter don’t do so because they give a shit about what I have to say – they do it because they too want to think that it isn’t just a useless way of stalking celebrities that you have almost no interest in stalking. Or because I know them in real life and they’d rather follow me than have to deal with me screaming WHY DON’T YOU LOVE ME? at them every time I see them in real life.

Which I would.

I know that I’m probably using it wrong, or I’ve missed the point of it, but to me it’s just like an RSS Feed that’s a bit easier to manage, and a little bit more personal. Facebook is where I keep the friends I actually talk to – Twitter is where I keep a list of the people I sort-of like enough to bother following, but will never ever be in a position to know.

Some of them, like I said, are worth following. Peter Serafinowicz almost makes the whole thing worth while on his own. Graham Linehan puts in a hefty amount of time to it and justifies the really-very-small amount of effort that people put into following what he has to say. There are more, but listing them here is pointless. I’m not trying to namedrop. If I was, I’d be writing this in 140 character sentences on Twitter and @’ing everyone.

This is getting a bit long now, which isn’t in the spirit of the piece, so I’ll wrap it up…basically, I like Twitter, use it daily…I just don’t know why. I don’t understand it and feel I never will.

At least until I’m famous and strangers start to follow me just to tell me I’m pretty.

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