Getting into the swing of Twitter

Love it or hate it, Twitter has irreversibly changed the way we communicate online, as Facebook did before it. From humble beginnings to a worldwide phenomenon, Twitter is huge and still growing.

Celebrities use it. Politicians use it. Sportspeople use it. Organisations use it. And most important of all, everyday people like you and me use it.

In an Australian first, a “Twitter debate” was held prior to the by-election for the state seat of Penrith. And now with a federal election imminent, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has finally risen above the laggards and joined the microblogging service herself.

This will be the first Australian election where social media will be such an important key battleground. It has simply become too big a forum to ignore.

But you probably know all of this already. You know how big Twitter is and chances are if you’re interested in this blog post then you’re into it.

But do you remember what life was like before there was Twitter?

I remember life before mobile phones. We made do, but all of us thought at some point or another how useful it would be to have a phone we could take with us. There was a need there.

But Twitter was not invented to fill an obvious void. For something that we’ve come to rely on with such vigour, it’s not something that any of us, once upon a time, would have thought we needed.

I joined Twitter in January 2009. At the time I did so because I thought it might be interesting to explore how I could leverage it in my then-career as a Marketing Manager.

My first experiences were how unnatural using Twitter was. As it had not been something I’d needed I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. I recall one time sitting at my computer for twenty minutes, staring at the screen, wondering what the hell I should type.

In those early days my tweets were few and far between. It simply wasn’t something that slotted into my day-to-day life. It never occurred to me to just let go and update random thoughts, start conversations with strangers or tweet my views on a particular issue. So apart from the occasional spruik for my sports blog, my Twitter account remained largely unloved.

Even at the start of this year as I jumped onto the next big thing, Foursquare, I still wasn’t tweeting very much. I remember selecting the option to feed my Foursquare to my Twitter account just so my followers wouldn’t think I’d died.

I can’t say when it happened. But the other day I looked at my day’s tweets and was struck by how many I’d sent. I just hadn’t realised, that during the normal course of my day I’d had so many things to share. The luxury of having a smartphone had allowed me to casually tweet as things occurred to me, and I’d barely noticed I was doing it.

Something I hadn’t needed was now entrenched into my life.

When did you first realise Twitter was entrenched in your day-to-day life? Please comment.

July 7, 2010 | Categories: Internet, Networking | Tags: Politics, Twitter | 1 Comment