TimeSplash Twitter Tour Starts Now!

The TimeSplash Non-Stop 24-hour Round-the-World Twitter Tour starts soon. The process is complicated but all you need to know is that I'll be in your timezone between 7pm and 8pm during the next 24 hours. To shout out to me as I go by, send me a tweet on Twitter.

This is my Twitter ID: @graywave ( http://twitter.com/graywave )

I'll be using the hashtag #timesplash if you'd like to follow the whole thing (and have lots of stamina and a very high tolerance for me saying "Hello New York", "Hola Argentina" "Gruetzi Switzerland" and such for the next 24 hours.)

Don't forget to shout. And if you know people in odd places, tell them to shout out too. I've a feeling some parts of this are going to be very lonely :-}

Not A Twit After All

I'm not saying I'll never twitter again, but I have noticed that I havent tweeted for several weeks now. So the grand experiment is over. It seems I'm not the twittering type...

...unlike millions of others. According to research by A C Nielson from March this year, unique visitors to the Twitter site grew by 1,382 percent year-on-year, from 475,000 in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009. Plus, there were another three-quarters of a million people accessing Twitter via their mobile phones and about a million sending and receiving Twitter SMS messages. I guess you could say it has become popular. It all adds up to about 240 tweets per user for the quarter to Feb '09. That's more than 2 per user per day. (No variances were given but I suspect there is a broad spread of usage patterns.)

I averaged just over half a tweet per day i the four months since I started.

Mind you, I picked up some interesting followers, including one young lady whose picture shows her posing in a latex catsuit.

I won't be closing my account or anything but I think I should acknowledge that this is not for me. Honestly, I don't care what someone I barely know in Indiana is having for breakfast, or that their dog just threw up on the carpet. And that @reply feature, where you get to see half the conversation someone you follow is having with someone you don't (about poetry markets in Belgium, or their holiday plans) is about the most useless load of nonsense I've ever seen. You'd think it would be intriguing, wouldn't you? Well, it's not.

Maybe when I've got something to sell, I will start stalking following hundreds of people the way everyone else does. Until then, I just don't see the point.

What Kind of Twit Twitters?

Well, you're about to find out. Look near the bottom of the left-hand column and you'll find my new twitter stream.

I've been resisting Twitter for quite a while now. Honestly, it just looks like a waste of bits. Yet so many people rave about it - people I would otherwise think quite highly of - that I suppose I ought to give it a go.

First impressions:

1. It's easier to do than I expected. I just leave the Twitter page open and type a quick burst of rubbish into it when it occurs to me to do so. The 140 character limit is actually a big help here. It stops me being as prolix as I'd like and therefore saves me from wasting so much time.

2. I'm just as likely to type in a random thought as to answer the question 'What are you doing?' which is supposed to be what it's all about. Maybe my random thoughts will be more interesting than the fact that I'm just off to have lunch. Twitter says its for the bits of your life in between blogs and emails. Well, maybe for me it's for the bits of my mind in between more coherent utterances.

3. Even after just half-a-dozen twitterings, the whole is looking far more interesting than the parts. Maybe a twitter stream is going to be a far more valuable and entertaining read than each individual utterance.

4. The word 'twitter' is very irritating. It's like 'twitcher'. An individual twitter entry should be called a 'twitch'. Maybe the next big thing will be like twitter but with a ten word limit. We could call that a 'tick'.

Anyhoo, I'll try it for a while and see what it comes to. Maybe I'll enjoy this mental twitching enough to keep at it for a while. If you're one of the twitterati (a twitcher,) then follow my twitchings by clicking the 'Follow me on Twitter' link at the bottom of my twitchings.

If you can bear it.