My Not So Private Tech Life

I’m definitely not the first one to write about their twitter experiences. I especially like this presentation because it sort of reflects my past two months of twittering, and gives me some inkling of what I might see there in the future.

There were two reasons for me to get onto the train in the first place:

a) I was told by many that the cream of the technology crop had already moved away from the blogosphere. If I wanted to be in on the most recent trends and tools and techniques I would have to follow people’s tweets instead of their weblogs.

b) Due to a chronic writer’s block I needed a way to get some stuff out without having to write full sentences or even paragraphs.

I feel like a lucky guy considering the fact that hardly any one from my personal life is on twitter, so I only follow 30+ people on a regular basis. That’s both not much and quite a lot. It does not take me long to read the 50+ updates per day and identify the 5+ that trigger something in me. But it would take all day to follow up on the 5+ topics, so I do that for only 1 or 2 per day. I actually feel closer to the origin of new ideas and I guess I know a bit more about the (mostly) humans whose tweets I follow. On the other hand, it’s my impression there has been nothing so far technologywise which I wouldn’t have learned about through a different channel.

How about my own writing? In the beginning I was quite self-consciuos as more people started to follow me, quite a few of which I really consider to be top notch in their field. This self-consciousness made me polish my updates to a ridiculous degree. Spending 30 minutes to spit out <141 characters: How vain can you get? Change made its way, though, after about a month (and a skiing holiday). Since then I basically write what comes to my mind and what I consider worthwhile to read for at least one of my followers. My rule is to not spend more than 5 minutes on a single post; if I catch myself doing otherwise, I delete all text and go back to real work.

Will I go on twittering? Abolutely, at least for the time being. Do I feel addicted? Not really, it’s more like a comfortable way to procrastinate. Should you follow me? Do as you please, I won’t hold it against you either way.