Twitter update
So I just wanted to throw down some more thoughts about my Twitter experiment again. As a reminder a few weeks ago, at the beginning of winter quarter, I decided to start Twittering. I just wanted to see what the fuss is about and I think I might do some research using Twitter, so I want to at least have tried it.
Let’s start with some stats:
People I am following: 43
People following me: 33
Times I have updated: 131
Yesterday was the first time I used Twitter during a breaking news situation (both the inaugural and then the breaking Kennedy news) and it was actually impressive. I was able to get a lot of information from a number of different sources. I was also able to directly communicate with a number of people very quickly. For example, most of my communication with Glenn, who was at the inauguration, was through Twitter. I also had no problems with overload or anything. I really expected Twitter to be slow and crashing from like 11:45 until a little after the speech.
The only problem I have been noticing is a problem I have mentioned before. There are a number of people that I talk to regularly who are not on Twitter. This includes: my friend Kevin, my brother, and pretty much everyone from school. Now that I am using Twitter there are times when I either (1) don’t tell these people something that I would have under normal circumstances, because I already mentioned it on Twitter and don’t care to discuss again or (2) feel a slight disconnect because they are missing the conversations on the Twitterverse. In short, there is an in-group and out-group being created around this new form of communication. I am, in my head, separating my network into at least two partitions (users and non-users). This goes along with my whole conception of perceived network connection.
So for the next few days I am going to try to keep track of everyone I talk to and how I talk to them (e.g. f2f, IM, Twitter, phone, e-mail). I just want to see how Twitter is changing my media usage.