I just made a rough count of how many links there were to this Thing--articles, applications, badges, etc.--and came up with 118. If all the More 23 Things have that many links to explore, it truly will be a challenge to get through the program by May 20.
Suffice it to say that clicking through those approximately 118 links to do Thing 31 wasn't happening, especially as I still haven't warmed up to Twitter in the first place (but as promised, I do drop by and update it every now and then and scramble to keep up with others' tweets). I ended up skimming the list, trying to pick out the most promising. Since Thing 27, we have set up a Twitter account at work, so I forwarded the links to David Lee King's posts to our Twitterer. I also glanced over the "9 Ways Twitter Can Help in the Real World" article. I guess I've been hanging out in a law library too long: when the author jokingly listed becoming a super-stalker as one of the 9 hints, I just went, "No, that really isn't funny," and stopped reading right then. (After which, "Get Facebook friends to use Twitter without them even knowing" sounded downright creepy).
Of all the "fun" things listed for Twitter, the most attractive was the one that integrated it with LibraryThing. After all, unlike Twitter, I enjoy using LT. But then I was done in by being too much of a cataloger: when it said that it searched Amazon as the default, I just couldn't bear it (I use Library of Congress as my first search site)!
I've been more attracted to Twitter when I haven't been working through the Twitter website itself. I've got TwitterFon on my iPod touch, and it streamlines Twitter nicely. It's also easy to use when I'm out and about--which is about the only time I'm doing anything interesting enough that I'd consider twittering. I'm interested in TweetDeck too, but it's too big for a dial-up connection to handle and I haven't gotten around to downloading it somewhere else to my flash drive and carrying it home. So as you may guess, since the web is my least favorite way of accessing Twitter, I haven't done a thing with my Twitter page other than choose one of the most basic templates.
No one writes neutrally about Twitter, do they? I glanced over "The 5 Stages of Twitter Acceptance" and noted that acceptance is considered the desireable outcome. Even the suggested articles for those of us "struggling" with Twitter (I am not struggling: it's not terribly complicated to use) mostly seemed to take the approach that using Twitter is what we should want to do. "The Limitations of Twitter" was irrelevant to my situation. I wanted to point out to the author of "What Exactly is the Point of Twitter?" that maybe his friends were constantly on Twitter, so that it made sense for him to check in multiple times a day and stay in touch with them that way, but my friends mostly aren't on Twitter at all, so why should I bother? That said, I did enjoy "The Inspiration that is Twitter." I don't hate Twitter and I find the phenomenon itself interesting--I just resent feeling pressured to enjoy it (sort of, if you don't find Twitter to be a crucial element of your social networking experience, you're obviously not using it properly).
