I’m back on Twitter

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a long time may recall that in 2008 I briefly experimented with Twitter and, after a few days, closed my account as I deemed it to be a waste of my time. At the time, this was true…Twitter held no value for me. Of course, at the same time, neither did Facebook, and yet now I don’t think I would be able to function without Facebook (or at the very least, the withdrawal symptoms would be difficult for a while).

For Facebook, this changed for me in either late 2008 or early 2009, I don’t really recall which of those times it was, when a growing number of overseas friends meant that it was easier to stay in touch that way. Since then, Facebook has grown for me in to both a news source and a limited creative outlet. Unfortunately it also causes me to stretch myself a bit too thin. I am much busier now than I was in 2009 and, as much as I might try to write something of substance here on a regular basis, it just doesn’t happen as much as it should…frankly, I don’t have the time, so I opt for the easier option of writing a quick opinion on Facebook and then neglecting the blog.

It is not ideal, but it would be safe to say that Facebook has become a mini-blog for me, with a limited audience. There are some benefits to this as not everything that I write on Facebook is intended for a public audience, but there is a downside too. Despite the fact that I am not paid to blog (not even by “Big Oil”, despite my views on mythical man-made global warming…but if anyone from “Big Oil” wants to send me a cheque, I’ll gladly accept it), and despite the fact that I am busy enough as it is, whenever I let this blog sit silently for a few days, I feel guilty, and I feel guilty because I feel that I am letting you, my handful of loyal readers, down. I feel worse about this because I know that I’ve posted some thoughts on Facebook which I would have liked to blog about, but I never got around to expanding the Facebook thought bubbles in to meaningful blog posts.

This, for me, is where Twitter comes in…or at least, might come in. I have a small following on Facebook, a slightly larger following here, and potentially some people I would like to follow on Twitter. I can integrate Twitter with this blog, and Twitter with Facebook, whereas I can not easily integrate selected posts from Facebook with this blog…and given the way facebook like to mess with settings on a regular basis, I don’t really think that will ever be viable. So, to me, it stands to reason that if I can share my small thought bubbles both on Facebook and on this blog by sharing them on Twitter, and I can gain a new stream of information in the process, it may very well be the right thing to do.

That said, I am still a wee bit skeptical of the whole thing. It annoyed me last time, and it didn’t get off to a good start this time when my name was one character too long to fit properly and I had to drop a space to make it fit. I’m also not convinced that I can make my thoughts fit in to 140 character bursts (I used to struggle with the character limit on Facebook when that existed, and that was much larger than Twitter’s limit), but I’m going to give it a go and see what happens. If it works out, then it will solve a few problems, and bring this blog back to life in the process.

I still intend on maintaining this blog…that won’t change…and I won’t be letting Russian guests write more blog posts than me (you should see the column she submitted this week…if there’s a sentence structure in there, I can’t find it, so I’ve sent it back for clarification and hopefully I’ll receive a publishable version for next week), but I will also be sharing my little thought bubbles here as daily digests of my Twitter activities. If all goes to plan, that should auto-publish at about 9pm Canberra time, or 9pm UTC if the Twitter Tools plugin is as insane as it was the last time around. You can also follow me on Twitter @Samuel_SGS ^[1] and I’ll see about adding one of those sidebar doohickey-thingamabobs.

At the very least, this should be an interesting ride. Hopefully a valuable one, but only time will tell on that one.

Samuel