@loharasukidog

Thing Eight: Microblogging (Twitter)

I've been thinking about Twitter for a long time. This included considering how it might be of use to the Society of California Archivists (SCA). Perhaps we'd be able to embed Twitter widgets in the SCA web site to make it easy to post updates and announcements, particularly ones from committees such as Government Affairs, Education, and Outreach & Publicity (O&P). But the SCA-related thoughts are on hold while waiting for the result of the Electronic Environment Task Force (EETF) which may be able to use them or provide a good alternative.

I have unofficially followed a number of tweeters for some time with a folder of bookmarks. Some of them I check every day or so, some I check once a month or so, others I check when I'm looking for a break. So doing this assignment was actually a little more difficult than the others because while I will probably abandon other accounts set up during 23things, I intend to hold on to the Twitter one. This meant finding a username that meant something beyond the 23things time.

Of course this led to frustration as my usual username had already been taken. I have been lohara for 26 years. And then my other possibilities were also taken. Twitter is limiting their audience by the restrictions on usernames -- only numbers, underscore, and lower case letters, though they don't bother to tell you the parameters. They are also limiting users by not cleaning out squatters, people who have clearly set up their accounts and abandoned them. At least in the domain name world, you have to pay some minimal amount to own a domain name forcing you to express your continued interest. So as time goes on people will be forced into longer and longer usernames which'll hurt in the 140 character limit. I considered something like loharchivist, but I didn't want to tie my Twitter identification to a single aspect of my self. I ended up with loharasukidog which ties it to my home domain.

Once I had set up my profile, I went through my list of bookmarks and now officially follow a few. Two are bloggers I follow, a few are organizations, and one is a friend. She has followed me back so now I feel an obligation to occasionally tweet.

One observation after a week of use…

I thought that by building my follow list I’d be able to abandon my folder of bookmarks. I find that my home page on Twitter feeds me retweets and plain tweets, but not tweets that are in response to another tweeter (@replies?). So on your Twitter home you get the announcements, but not the conversations. Seems at odds with the whole open conversation concept.

However, I do plan to continue with Twitter and am looking forward to learning the ins and outs such as hashtags, synching twitter to a blog or a web site and vice versa, just seeing where it goes. As I said I’ve been following some tweeters for a while and I’ve noticed that tweeting goes from one way announcement postings to a conversation after a while. Hope to join in the conversation.