Week 5- Twitter Week

Twitter week, for me was a mixture of enjoyment, work, stress, frustration and sometimes even aggravation. I’ll explain. It was interesting, but it was also stressful to find interesting, unique or helpful topics to tweet about.  But at the same time, it forced me to get involved, seek information, read different forums and choose topics of interest to share. For a moment I felt like I was a part of the ‘social media’ team, sharing opinions, information and tips. But now that it’s over, I’m just another outsider looking in, with nothing of any importance to share. My hope is to get back in the swing of things on a regular basis, however, having just moved, I am overwhelmed with everything that entails and find my time severely limited, which prevents me from spending chunks of time perusing forums and digests.   

I found that the problem with getting on some of those mailing lists is that my mail box became extremely full every day.  For me, I think I would be happy with a weekly update rather than a daily update, but then what’s news now wouldn’t be news a week from now–which puts people like me between a rock and a hard place, as they say. (whoever they are.) 

I was aggravated by the tweeters who dominated my tweety box. Sometimes one person filled my entire page, or pretty nearly, with their continual random thoughts, which required me to scroll to other pages to see what other people had to say or offer.  I think some ethical guidelines to lay a foundation about how many tweets in a day is polite and how many tweets start to become annoying, would be helpful for some of us.

It was interesting to read what seasoned Tweeters Tweet about. I noticed a lot of the seasoned people who I followed, follow some of the same people, so there was overlap with what each commented on or retweeted.

Overall, the experience was positive, informative and provided some connections to the outside world with people of like minds. It also gave me a chance to learn more about Twitter and its usage and applications.  And I must say, having people follow me was/is exciting. It makes me feel a sense of responsibility to share things of importance and value.