I’m sure I’ll regret this, but this week I finally began using Twitter. Yes, yes, I know. Anyway…
If you haven’t used it before, or seen the results, then the simplest way to explain it is to compare it with this weblog: here, I send out reasonably well-thought-out ‘articles’, of perhaps a few paragraphs in length, every week or two. Twitter encourages you to send out very short messages as often as you feel like it: every few hours, or even more frequently (Yes, I’m looking at you LoudMouthMan).
Some say this results in rather more banality in the messages, such as “Just having a cup of tea” or “Wondering where to have lunch”. The messages don’t have to be like that, of course. They are like that, though, if you happen to be Stephen Fry. Many UK-based people will follow Mr Fry’s twitterings, since (with the exception of the above) they are usually Quite Interesting and often insightful.
I’ve added a Twitter feed to the front page of this web site, showing the most recent of my own messages. Some of them may appear out of context, if they are addressed to someone else (i.e. if they start with “@someone: …”).
It’s interesting following some of the celebs: Mr Fry told us all about the nice lunch he’d had with Alan Davies and the producers of QI; Robert Llewelyn described some detail of the recording of the new Red Dwarf episodes and so on.
So, if you’re interested, you can follow me.