On 2st March 2006, Jack Dorsey wrote the first tweet ever. It is now fair to say that Twitter has revolutionized the way people communicate. I have been a Twitter user since 1st May 2009 when my @eoloughlin account was set up - that's 1,058 days ago according to Twopcharts.
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| The first tweet. Image link to Mashable. |
When I am having my breakfast I now always check personal email (never work email) and Twitter on my iPad. It's great to see news items and what people are up to. I follow a lot of academic folks who are brilliant at sharing ideas and providing links to articles that I might otherwise not discover.
However, there's a lot of trivia and junk on Twitter, and we need to choose carefully who and what we follow. Otherwise we'll be snowed under with tweets. I am following 493 people - sometime the flow of tweets on Tweetdeck is hard to keep up with. I often wonder what people who follow thousands of people do - speed read?
As mentioned in a previous blog post, my practice is not to have Twitter on during work. It is incredibly distracting and I am also concious that anything that I tweet is highly visible - eg to a student waiting for results of a test or an answer to a question. Also - colleagues (though very few are on Twitter) and managers can also see me tweeting when the expectation might be that I should be doing some "real work". I envy some academic colleagues from other institutions who seem to be able to tweet at will.
So - a belated "Happy Birthday" to Twitter. Long may it, and all who sail in her, live.
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