Rather engaging...

As a frequent Twitter user I've engaged in quite a few "conversations" using the various options - @username, DM username, RT etc. I think it takes some practice to use these features well, and I'm not sure I've quite cracked it yet. Sometimes I find that when replying to someone I follow, my follow-up tweet is incomprehensible to my followers, who did not see the original tweet. Yet it would be cumbersome to provide the original tweet there too, and would go over 140 characters.

Sometimes I wonder about the optimal tweet volume. Periodically I begin following someone only to unfollow them the next day because they are tweeting too much, and filling up my stream. Maybe if you follow huge number of people this is less noticeable. Institutions seem particularly guilty of this, they may have multiple people tweeting on one account, and are probably under some pressure to promote items (like articles in a newspaper), and it can get tiresome.

Beating a hasty reTweet

I finally got to use my favourite Twitter joke for the title of this post. I have been "on the Twitter" for quite a while now - yes, at first I did wonder if it was a bit pointless, and did post too much about what I was about to eat and the current weather conditions. Over time, however, I've had fun using replies, retweets and direct messages, and following some well-known people who are living rather public lives via their Twitter feed, which I find quite generous and surprising of them. The author Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) uses the medium really well, and has attracted so many followers that he often links to a site in a tweet only to have the server crash spectacularly (this phenomenon now has its own hashtag, #neilwebfail).