Please excuse my tardiness, for various reasons I’m a bit behind (neighbours moving out and taking their internet with them, Umbrella, day-job, really dreading Thing 4 and so putting it off like there are a million tomorrows…). No more procrastination – on to Thing The Fourth!
According to twuration and howlonghaveyoubeentweeting, I’ve been tweeting since 27th January 2009, making my account 899 days old, or 2 years, 5 months, 2 weeks, 1 day, 10 hours, 46 minutes, 13 seconds old at this precise moment. Blimey.
Two and a half years ago I was a graduate trainee and had just started getting involved in things library-related, so I think I’ve always used twitter for that purpose, although much more so over the last year, through Voices for the Library advocacy and Save Doncaster Libraries campaigning. I mainly use it for:
- Keeping up with library news – current awareness
- Retweeting interesting things (and using it as a platform through which to share interesting library-related quotes, articles & photos via tumblr – not all the stuff on my tumblr is library-stuff and I tend to untick the ‘send to twitter’ option if it’s not)
- Promoting and publicising what I do – news, events, blog posts etc.
- Talking to people about libraries, campaigning, getting ideas and feedback, asking for information and help etc.
- Livetweeting at events so that people who aren’t there can find out what’s being said (for example, I was rapidly tweeting away at Umbrella using the #ub11 hashtag)
- Keeping up with world news (and comments about it from comedians, journalists and musicians)
- Talking about general rubbish with friends
- Telling people what I had for tea
Although the last two might not be particularly useful per se, I think it is a good thing to be a ‘real person’ online, so I don’t really try to avoid this. I think it’s safe to say I’m a pretty prolific tweeter…some of it’s quality, some of it is really not, but I seem to be able to maintain a gradually growing number of followers so I get the impression I’m mostly useful and vaguely interesting to follow! I’ve started warning people about when I’m going to be constantly tweeting at conferences to give them a chance to unfollow me and refollow me afterwards if they want to, but there’s also the option to filter out certain words or hashtags, which saves having to remember to refollow someone afterwards.
I follow quite a high number of accounts (almost 800) and although they’re not all regular posters, I find it useful to have certain lists. (I think librarians must be the most ideal twitter users – they love their lists. I’m on 129!) I do need to filter out my ‘librarians’ list into individuals and organisations I think, although I enjoy the way they blend together sometimes.
On my laptop I use tweetdeck, which is a friendlier browser than your standard internet browser for using twitter, and displays lists and searches nicely so you can ignore certain ones when you don’t need them. It has its problems and little buggy bits, but nothing to make me want to switch to anything else so far. Unfortunately I don’t have a fancy enough phone to be able to use it on there, and I’ve not been brave enough to ask tech support to allow me to install it on my work PC (probably all for the best, my productivity would no doubt take a nose-dive…) but it works well when I’m at home or at events and stuff.
RSS
I started trying to use Google Reader about a year ago and failed miserably. I put too much on there, kept forgetting to check it, looking at blog posts through other routes and generally getting in a bit of a mess with it. I figured that if something was important enough, I’d come across it on twitter or someone would tell me about it. My relaxed attitude seems to be working ok so far but I’d like to get a bit more organised so that I can be a bit more efficient in preparation for my PhD starting next year. I’ve therefore completely wiped my RSS feed and will be starting again! Any recommendations for must-reads would be more than welcome, please.
Pushnote
I’m afraid I just don’t have the time or energy to play with a new toy, so I’m going to deliberately give this little bit a miss. Bad Lauren.
