Q: Am I on twitter?A: No... not really.
Hey, do you remember MySpace?
Actually, let me go back a little further.
Did you know there was something called Friendster?
A girl known to a select few of my friends under the codename "Teriyaki Box" convinced me to join Friendster as a way to stay in touch after we met on a plane to Reno. Friendster didn't add anything to anybody's life, and it quickly fizzled and took it's rightful irrelevant place in the world.
Then there was another girl who convinced me to join MySpace. Sorry if there's a pattern developing here... To give you an idea of how much I liked that girl, she was never given a nickname. And I still, many years later, can't begin to write about what happened with that - even though the sleepless nights she caused me BEGAN MY BLOGGING in an effort to get my mind elsewhere.
That "View de TQ" blog on MySpace kept me tied to MySpace long since that social networking site overstayed its welcome. Finally, I grew tired of its retina shattering profiles and endless banner advertisements trotting out webcam girl after webcam girl. My excuse for not joining facebook was that I could only handle one social network site at a time - and that facebook didn't have blogging capabilities. Then, once I realized I could move the blog to bloggger/blogspot and import said posts into "notes" on facebook I finally moved my official home of Internet time wasting to facebook.
I put up a similar aversion to Twitter, citing that I didn't want to maintain another online profile. More importantly, Twitter didn't seem to add anything that couldn't be executed in a well typed facebook status update. However, a few weeks ago, as the integration between Twitter and facebook looked a lot smoother than it did during its boom I ventured to sign up on Twitter.
Twitter is more appealing to me as a place to follow other personalities of note. And facebook can't compete with the "trending" phenomenon. You can thank major media outlets for constantly reporting on celeb-tweets for my growing interest in those celebrities not making it to the evening news (the ones I personally care about).
Thankfully, the most obvious names of accounts for me were taken - and not wanting to be something like "@TQ3000" kept me from finalizing my setup. Still, I kinda made the decision that Twitter was going to be worth my while and felt like I had unfinished business.
A few moments ago I downloaded the Twitter app for my phone and was instantly validated to the point I had to immediately write about it. I don't need an account on Twitter to view my Twitter app. Not to mention, I have access to the aforementioned coveted Trending Now screen.
Here's my favorite tweet I read in my first run through the Twitterverse:
"After Inception was over, I grabbed the film reel and fucked it. That's how much I loved this movie." #PredictingMyInceptionReviewThat tweet is courtesy Aziz Ansari (azizansari). For the record, he hasn't even seen the movie.yet.
