Anyone who knows me knows I’m not a fan of social networks. Frankly, I find participating in social networks to be a false representation of social behavior;  a farce I just don’t have the desire to humor. Not to get too preachy here but, well, this is my blog so na-na-nana-na:

The way I look at social networks is as time sinks with little practical use compared to the maintenance and care required for the account. Not that I find them useless though. I had spent the last 4 years (around) working for a social marketing agency and have personally witnessed the benefits of social networks in building brand awareness and loyalty. But the work required entailed a dedicated, college educated, person and a couple student interns working 40 hours a week each to accomplish.

Me? I have shit to do thankyouverymuch. I want to spend my time producing ideas, projects and programs. I don’t want to spend any time tending to a social network profile with ephemeral friendships and connections. But apparently Twitter is different. Michael Lop sums it up nicely:

Twitter is a social network, yes, but it’s a social network without the superpoke scrabtaculous zombie noise and, for that, I’m thankful, because I’ve got work to do. Yes, I could spend days tidying my profile and scrubbing my friends list, but to what end? I want to know more people, and sure, it’s interesting to see what they’re up to, but what I really want to know is what is going on inside their heads with a minimum of fuss.

So once again I’m late to a party acting like they’re lucky to have me. I have finally, finally, begun to see the usefulness and benefits of Twitter. It’s weird because I’ve been working so closely with Twitter for the last year interacting with their API and I never “got” it until recently. I’m actually a little embarrassed about this. So many of my personal friends are on Twitter along with my peers online and I was a little pompous about the whole thing. My Bad.

What ended up turning  my perspective around was the realization that Twitter didn’t take any real effort. Outside of the marketing and announcement use (blog posts/updates, code release, project release, etc) all other status updates Twitter needs can be completely random thoughts along the lines of  a friendly conversation.

One key difference between Twitter and this blog is that this blog, and the discussion in it, are not in any way personal towards me or anyone else. But with Twitter, well, that can be, and probably should be, personal and a little intimate. Not completely understand, but the conversation appears to need to be a little more random and personal.

When I ask myself why I have this blog (and really why I think anyone has a blog), and if there’s a requirement of complete honesty, career is definitely at the top of the list. Yes there’s a love of writing and the conversation. But after that, career and ambition are what really motivates me to write and drives this site. (And yes ego has a little to do with it too but that’s a whole other discussion 😊)

So, we’re really talking about a tool of promotion and marketing. I can understand that a little better for some reason.

So yes. I am on Twitter now and I actually like it. It’s liberating to be so open (which doesn’t make much sense to me at all… but there it is). If you’re a fan of this blog (hell, even if you hate me and think I’m an idiot) you might want to follow me 😊.