I have always been one who's up for a challenge. I mean, any kind of challenge, really. So, when I first heard about Twitter in 2008, I was very intrigued by this new kid on the block, this two-year-old "toddler of technology" at the time. How hard can it be, I thought.
As it turns out, that bold approach to Twitter bit me in the ass from day one, and now I am officially being stalked by Twitter. It's true. Recently when I made a life-changing decision to "come out" and put my writing out there for people other than my reluctant family to read, I became enlightened. Some of this enlightenment was by choice and some of it was like being duct taped to a seat in a movie theatre and then forced to watch the Star Wars Trilogy for 36 hours straight. In the beginning, somewhere around "Hollywood week" of American Idol's Season 8, I barely knew how to upload pictures to my photo gallery. I wasn't a complete idiot or anything; I knew how to plug the camera into the laptop, but once the files were uploaded, I could never figure out where the hell they went. Sometimes I searched for up to an hour before I gave up and then finally resorted to disconnecting the cable, re-connecting it and then repeating the "file upload" process once again. I watched my screen like a cat trying to catch a mouse to try to decipher where they landed.
I know it would have been much easier to ask one of my kids - I do live with 16-year-old "Mr. Mac," who is building his own website using Dreamweaver (from original graphic he created in Photoshop, no less.) Or Miss Facebook." my 17-year-old who currently has about 50 individual photo albums between her Facebook and Myspace accounts containing no less than 2000 photos, (all perfectly cropped, re-sized, tagged and saved). But I was too proud for this move, so, I decided to go the stupid route and run through downloading for dummies process one more time as I tried to pay closer attention to that mystery file where my images were stored. Sitting here today, six American Idol eliminations later, I feel quite accomplished - or at the very least, techno-confused. As I hacked my way into the bloggalicious world, I challenged myself to overcome my fears as well as my shortcomings, of which there were many. For me, the only way to take on these challenges was how I take on everything else - head on, in sort of a "learn as you go fashion." In retrospect, this could have been a mistake.
Although the whole photo debacle might seem really, really moronic to an outsider (who's smarter than a fifth grader), it ended up working out and now I've mastered the mystery, of which I will spare you the details. To my dismay, I grew to learn that the blogger's world is all about being connected - and this doesn't mean by phone or holding hands. It's a connection that, dare I say, many people like me (who haven't had a need) just don't get. So, there I was, laptop perched on my unshaven, 47-year-old thighs, wondering what RSS, Linked In, Twitter and Digg were. I clicked on each one and tried to do a bit of reading to research them, but after about 20 minutes I felt like I needed a cocktail. One glance at the clock and my head started to hurt - it was only 1pm, so I couldn't even use the line, "It's 5o'clock somewhere" I got back to business and decided Twitter was the simplest and first victim on my list.
The application description made it sound easy to activate and friendly to use. I would be able to post it to my blog widgets features and "follow" whomever I selected. Plus, you have to admit, just the name "Twitter" is cute, right? Add the fact that their logo is a tiny little bird, and when you post an update, it's called a "Tweet" - who could resist? I signed up for my account, created a username, "ShelliN," and entered a password. Immediately I was offered the option to follow Ashton Kutcher and Kelly Rippa. I declined, but if Zac Efron was on the menu, I would have been tweeting about his abs and pecs all day long. However, I did choose to follow CNBC, because I had just put a little money in the stock market when the DOW plunged to below 7000 - which it hadn't seen since pagers were all the rage and the sleekest cell phones weighed about 1.3 pounds.
Testing the waters with Twitter was a good call - Twitter gave me the confidence I needed to move on. Next up was Facebook, Myspace, StumbleUpon, Digg, Yahoo Buzz, and Share It to name a few. The next thing I knew I was embedding code, mastering RSS, vodpod feeds, and creating hyperlinked maps to my sites. If you're a techie this may not sound impressive, but for someone who couldn't find her own photo gallery just five weeks ago before Jorge Nunez got kicked off American Idol - this is like climbing Mt. Everest, getting to the summit and jamming a "ShelliN" flag in the ground!
There have been a few drawbacks from my hyper-techno-bloggalicious frenzy -- I'm not going to lie. Something crazy happened to my toolbars with all the insanity of Delicious and Stumble Upon and the Firefox add-on that I don't even recall installing. Apparently, they are having some kind of civil war with my favorites and tool bars, so things randomly appear and disappear. One day my favorites are exactly that, my favorites. And other days they're just gone. For some reason one night around 3 AM. Delicious got into a conflict with the other two and won - in the morning when I logged on - BAM - no favorites; just a fancy little Delicious checker box sitting there looking all pompous. So, I'm thinking all progress is not good - at least until I get the Delicious shenanigans under control, anyway.
As for Twitter, well our relationship has sort of deteriorated. The first few day's things were going well. Although the Wordpress blog feature wasn't functioning properly, they were very nice and sent me an email about it. It was like sending a text and letting me know they were going to be late for dinner. They went up 20points in my book that day. My CNBC updates were awesome. I set the tweet feature to "off from midnight to 7am because I wanted to get some undisturbed shuteye, which was really quite goofy since I stay up till 2 AM writing. Nonetheless, this seemed to work for a few days - or what I like to call "my Twitter honeymoon."
I awoke each morning to two or three tweets with headlines such as: CNBCtopStories: New Players Eye Used Video Game Marketplace, followed by a tiny URL for the expanded story. My friends at CNBC followed the rules and I was happy about this. After the fifth day or so, things took a turn for the worse. Someone at CNBC was able to see that I had not clicked on their story links or and they were pretty pissed off about it. The next thing I knew the tweets started coming closer and closer together, just like labor pains. When I woke up on day six, CNBC had tweeted me eight times in seven hours. I felt violated and more than a little confused. How could there possibly be eight TOP stories while I was snoozing. I clicked back on one of the headlines just to make sure it didn't say "CNBCregularStories:" it didn't. Weird.
The next day things got really ugly. The tweets turned into full-on squawks. Then the squawks turned into abrasive screeches. Somehow, I went from receiving three updates during my seven-hour slumber to being slammed with CNBC in-your-face-contradictory-24x7-coverage every 18 minutes. I'm more than sad about this because the reason I had originally signed up to follow their tweets was to get info on the market and economy. The first few days they delivered too, e.g. - "CNBCtopStories: Market will test new lows in Q2 analysts say. Http:// www.blahblahblah." After receiving tweets like these I responded with actions (or inactions) on my E*TRADE account. It all made sense- I was going to make some money in the market with these tweety little tips. Fast forward to today - A sampling of some of the nocturnal tweets from two nights ago included such contradictory "top stories" such as, "Recession end insight," and "Economy still sinking - recession ahead." These continued throughout the day, and I responded by jumping on my E*TRADE account as the tweets came in; I was like Big Brown at the Kentucky Derby, twitching and ready to jump out of the starting gate (only this was every 18 minutes). After the 12th tweet, I got an email from E*TRADE letting me know that they suspected fraudulent hacking attempts into my account. I now knew the limit on "forgot password."
This was a turning point for me - I sat at my desk, with my clammy hand rubbing my tense forehead - wondering what had become of my relationship with Twitter and what had happened to me? All I ever wanted was advice on the economy and now I was getting news flashes on when the Obama's new pooch went number two.
I realized that I couldn't be more than an arms-length from my Blackberry and its Tweets; once I even tried to take it in the shower with me. I was addicted to hearing the chime of the text tweet, which I had set on a special tone to match the cute look of the little birdie logo. I was addicted to getting the info, regardless of how insignificant or contradictory it was. The day that I received more than ten tweets that said, "The sky is blue," then, "The sky is white," followed by, "The sky is blue," I realized my tweet source was not what I thought it was. Here I had gone into a relationship completely trusting and open - a tweet virgin. I was ready to try something new - and now I found myself not only led astray, but I was being stalked all day and all night in a completely one-sided relationship. I decided I couldn't let this go any further. I reasoned no tweet was better than a bad tweet, or was it? It was about the quality of the tweets - not the quantity, right? I had to put an end to this tweeting for good, so I logged on to my account and found "CNBC-Stop Tweets." As my finger hovered over the < enter > button suddenly I realized that I had never sent one tweet to anyone - not one single tweet. I knew why too. To send a tweet you could only use 140 characters - that's about 16 words, unless you're attaching a story URL then it's less. Somehow, I had become a peeping Tweeter.
At this stage of my life, if I'm anything, I'm self-aware. I happen to be blessed with the gift of gab; some of the stories I've crafted for my blog and website were practically full-length mini-series that I had to edit down to make them a properly digestible length that a reader could finish with one cup of coffee. As for Twitter and its 140 characters per tweet?! -- I can barely sneeze in 140 characters! So, I hit<enter > on the <Stop Tweets> option and looked down at my Blackberry, realizing that things were going to get pretty quiet around here - maybe even quiet enough for my dog to hear the fridge door open.
Update 16 hours later: Coincidentally, I wrote this story at 2pm on Thursday, April 16. When I jumped on my computer this morning, 18 hours later, the top Yahoo Buzz headline read: Ashton Kutcher Becomes First Twitter Member to Net 1 Million Followers. That's right folks -- he took on CNN and beat them with followers. I must be missing something here. Incidentally, CNBC has found a way to defy my <Stop Following > command. This morning's Blackberry greetings included the following stalkeresque tweets: 1:35:53AMCNBCtopStories: The Euro Is Not Weak: ECB's Trichet, 3:09:56AMCNBCtopStories: Africa is the One Frothy Market, 3: 10:57AM CNBCtopStories: Steals and Deals, Where to Find Bargains, 3:57:53AM CNBCtopStories: Citigroup Narrows Loss, Topping Forecasts, 4:12:26AM CNBCtopStories: AIG Chief Owns Significant Stake in Goldman, 4:43:56AM CNBCtopStories: Mattel Loss Just Misses View; More Sales Pain Seen, 5:29:10AM CNBCtopStories: BB&T Profit Tops Views Despite Rising Loan Losses, 6:00:54AM CNBCtop Stories: Chrysler CEO Says New Board Coming With Fiat, 7:00:54AM CNBCtopStories: Traders,Not Investors, Fueling Rally: NYSE Chief, 7:03:57AM CNBCtopStories: McDonald's CEO: Consumers Still 'Skittish', 7:15:23AM CNBCtopStories: Consumer Mood Rebounds in April.
Now this lengthy, detailed update really only proves a couple of things: I clearly was wrong choosing not to follow Ashton Kutcher vs. CNBC; and in reviewing last night's nocturnal tweet times, someone at CNBC obviously went to lunch between 1:35AMand 3:09AM because there was absolutely no tweeting going on during that time. Also, I'm not sure, but whomever the CNBC "Tweeter" is, may or may not have gone out for a smoke break between the hours of 6:00AM and 7:00AM. Lastly, I'm done with this one-sided-no-boundary relationship with Twitter. So, I've decided today is the day I'm going to start tweeting back. My first tweet: 8:19:22AM SHELLINtopStories: Made Coffee. Sent CNBC Spam Mail. Deleted Twitter.
Shelli Netko 2008 (c)
Add comment
Comments