Up, Down, Up

I was on Twitter today. This is notable in that I hadn't been on since Friday, six full days ago. Are you on Twitter? I'm not necessarily going to say you should be, but it is a decent way to connect with people and things, like restaurants, you normally wouldn't "converse" with. It's a great way for businesses, nonprofits, etc. to keep up with their audience, though of course for that to work you have to have an audience--that would be you. I have a pet peeve about Twitter, in that a lot of people simply use it as an instant messaging device--tweet something, receive a tweet, move on. The beauty of Twitter lies in "retweets," where you can not only enjoy and learn from the people you follow, but you can spread (retweet) the word to your followers. This is where the networking part of social networking comes into play, in my view. So retweet, people.

I'm on Twitter every day. I'm smarter from reading newspapers than as a result of my twenty years of formal education, and if you follow the right things on Twitter, it can be like one big newspaper for ya. Everything that gets publicized about Twitter is the silly stuff. In my opinion, Facebook is far sillier than Twitter.

Of course, any new information platform means more of just that, information. I don't really need more information. I need less information and more time to ponder the information I do receive. The flip side is, on Twitter you can more or less choose the type of information you receive. You buy a newspaper, and the information is prescribed, and if you know me you know that I don't need a recap of the previous night's "American Idol" in print staring at me. Nothing, though, will ever eclipse the anticipation I get from opening a fresh Times. A long time ago, I thought it was silly that people who didn't live in New York read The New York Times--just like you may think now that Twitter is silly.

So I shut it off after work Friday, I do use Twitter for work, with plans of course to reboot far before six days passed. Then I barfed--often and tons, six pounds worth of my physical being, as a matter of fact. Sunday night, Monday. Is there anything more cathartic, physically and emotionally, than involuntarily retching all that you got? Somehow I feel like more than "stuff" was purged from my being.

Finally, today I re-launched Tweet Deck. I must feel better, and certainly in more ways than one I've felt less overloaded the past six days. Let us now, though, let the information binge begin again.