Alright, so besides grinding away at some writing lately, I did two things of importance: I went to a Republican dinner party as a guest of one of Maine’s gubernatorial candidates, and I signed up for Twitter. Now, I suspect you’re wondering what the connection could be, but fear not for I shall tell you! Bruce Poliquin has decided to use social media to spread the word about his campaign, including using Facebook, Twitter, and Twitpic. Although his usage of Facebook is a little lacking, he uses Twitter and Twitpic on an almost-daily basis.
Twitter is like the status updates of Facebook except it can be in any person (not just third person in order to make sense) and it really has no other features. Gubernatorial candidate Bruce has 436 followers on Twitter, which is actually a decent number of people for this particular social networking client. A friend of mine and the person who turned me on to candidate Poliquin, Kendra, is in the book business – writing, publishing, etc. – and has a whopping 2,661 followers! As far as Twitter is concerned, she’s famous, and Twitter still isn’t as mainstream as websites like Facebook and (though it’s on its way out) MySpace. I had previously refused to use Twitter for moral reasons up until I realized just how powerful of a social utility it can be. Now, I don’t pretend to be famous, but if people making that sort of difference in the world (i.e. running for political office or writing books), why can’t I use Twitter to my advantage as well?
So, I signed up for an account and was immediately at a loss. After getting some of the basics down, I found a few friends to follow and some cool people from other countries like Japan who post a lot of neat pictures on Twitpic. All in all, I’m not really a twitter bird, nor am I keen on using the service. As interesting as following new people is, Twitter, I think, is a social networking tool for people who have more important things to say than I do. I concede that much, and until I have more important things to say I will probably keep my twittering to a minimum.
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