Twitter

At the beginning there was Friendster. Then Myspace, then Facebook, the boom of blogging and now, finally Twitter.

I’ll be honest I don’t really get Twitter.

I know it should be useful. In fact, the more I hear about it, the more certain I grow that I am not taking as much advantage of it as I could. However, what exactly it is that I’m supposed to be doing with it I have no clue. Twitter is supposed to be a great tool for bloggers and hence when I was first looking at becoming a writer full time, I signed up. So far (5-6 months later) I am sitting at 2 tweets, following 8 people (one of whom is Perez Hilton) and being followed by 9.

I have this blog now about my adventures of becoming a writer, and I am planning to start another blog with more “real” writing on it. I haven’t linked any of my blogs to Twitter yet. I know I can post my twitter updates on my blog, but I think I would want to post my blog updates on my twitter – would I not? I’m pretty sure there is a way to do this, I just haven’t clicked the right button.

I think back to when Facebook first launched their live feed of what everyone was doing, and I remember wondering, why would I care who so and so made friends with today or that they added the mafia wars application (don’t even get me started on that one) or what they’re doing right now? Even the whole concept of status updates is kind of silly if you think about it. But I still look at what my friends are doing all over the world, and I still tell them what I’m doing. Maybe Twitter will be the same. Maybe all of a sudden it’ll make perfect sense to me to log into a web networking site just to tell my (hopefully more than 9 followers) exactly what it is that I’m doing in 140 words or less.

So I’m reading this article called Twitter: Why So Many People Don’t Get It. Besides blogging, Twitter is apparently great for building a network (an abbreviated LinkedIn?), learning, promotion of events or products, finding jobs, life updates and breaking news. And its true if you think about it, the night after Will.I.Am allegedly hit Celebrity Blogger Perez Hilton, Twitter found out before the cops did.

I remain leery of things such as job-hunting on Twitter, but I do think it could be a great tool for me to network and establish my blogs as long as I can get over the awkwardness of having a single tool that is used solely for the purpose of updates. I still don’t think that I will get to the point any time soon where I’m twittering about banal everyday things such as cooking or doing laundry, but I am excited about discovering a whole new way to communicate with the outside world.

I still don’t really get the personal messages “@” other subscribers, but that will be another journey for a time when I don’t feel awkward answering that “what’s happening?” question that stares at me with a wide blank expectant box.

Endings

Endings are my weakness. When discussing personal/memoir style articles in our Travel Writing class, we were told to ignore any sort of writing “rules” we had learned in school besides the basic grammar stuff. We were free to use “I”, we didn’t have to follow structure and last of all we didn’t have to have a formal conclusion. I’m good with this, mostly, (i.e. in the beginning and the middle). Truth be told, endings always have and continue to haunt me. I feel that I need to wrap up any sort of non-fiction with a “what we have learned above is…” and in fiction they make me extremely insecure. I can dream up all sorts of situations, complex and simple, but I’m incapable of figuring out how they would work themselves out in a realistic un-abbreviated way. I can build tension till the cows come home but when it comes to conflict (the non-confrontational person I am), I prefer to skid through it at high speeds and wrap-up/conclude as soon as possible, to the point that even now I am having some trouble finishing this little piece on endings. So my goal for the next little while is to work on that skill, try to teach myself to end things properly and fully, even if it means that a story stays unfinished for so much longer, or I need to create fuller outlines. THE END.