Resisting Twitter

Or: “Why I hate Twitter, and why I just signed up.”

Before I drive into Twitter, let’s talk about BBSes for a moment.

Back in the 1980s, nerds, geeks and technophiles communicated through Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes). BBSes were … ah, hell, if you were planning on reading any further than this line you already know what BBSes were.

Most BBSes were privately owned. Sure, a few Radio Shacks and other computer stores and some computer clubs ran bulletin board systems, but the overwhelming majority of BBSes were owned by private individuals (Sysops, or System Operators) who paid for and supported them with their own money and ran them from their homes. That meant that as a user you were a guest on their system, and most users acted accordingly.

This also meant that if you wanted to make your own rules — to “build your own sandbox” to play in so-to-speak — you were certainly able to do so. Technically all you needed was a computer, a phone line, and some software to launch your own BBS. There were no licenses or official applications required to start one. You set one up, you advertised the phone number, people called, and if they liked what they saw, they called back.

There were many reasons why people started their own BBSes. Some enjoyed the theoretical power they held over their virtual denizens while others enjoyed the ability to customize and create entire virtual worlds unique to any other. And then there were people like myself, who put BBSes online because they were tired of other people’s BBSes going down. The problem with putting a lot of time and effort into someone else’s BBSes was that sometimes BBSes went away, either because the hardware died or because the Sysop moved away or because the owners simply got tired of running the BBS and just turned it off. Back when Apples and Commodores ruled the land, we were not multitasking. Running a BBS meant somebody somewhere had invested a thousand dollars into a computer system dedicated to running their BBS. In fact, most people I knew who ran BBSes owned two computers during a time when most households didn’t even own one. Many times over many years, there were specific BBSes that I became attached to. BBSes were my first experience to online communities, and it sucked when one went away, usually in the middle of the night without warning. Imagine your favorite Internet forum (or maybe online gaming world) being instantly deleted, in a time before e-mail existed. Just, you know, “poof”. Sometimes you ran into those people somewhere else and sometimes you never found them again, but you never found the same combination of people again, ever. And of course, all your posts and mail messages and work were deleted, instantly, forever. And that sucked. Bad.

So that’s why I put up my own BBS: so I could run things my way, and build my own community of people, and not having to worry about it ever going away. I built a BBS so that when people wanted to talk to me, they called my house. I set up things the way I wanted to. I made rules I enjoyed. I did things my way, and did them with my people. I built it, and ran it, and kept it online for a few years until the phone stopped ringing and all of my users had moved to the Internet.

My first official ISP was TheShop.net, back in Washington state. It was there that I set up my first website. I put up a few pictures and a few links and that was that. It was my new virtual “home”. When I moved back to Oklahoma, I closed down that account and opened up an account at NextDim.com, moving my “home” again in the process. When I moved from dial up to cable modem, I closed down that account and migrated my “home” to Cox’s web space. Even though I wasn’t setting up a “community” per se at any of these places, moving around still sucked. To me it was like changing my name every year and forcing people try to find me (again) in the phone book. It didn’t make sense. Eventually I registered robohara.com, which has hopefully solved that problem. Now no mater where my site is hosted, robohara.com will point to it. Unless something changes (and we all know that nothing ever changes on the Internet, right?) I plan on having “robohara.com” point to “wherever Rob O’Hara is” for the rest of my life.

So I set up my little Internet roadside stand and hung up my little “robohara.com” sign and waited for people to stop by. And they did, eventually. People searching for “Rob O’Hara” on Google get directed here. Eventually I installed WordPress, and turned the site into a blog as well. Things were good. Once again I had a little virtual “home”, a place where people could find me. You want Rob O’Hara? You go to robohara.com!

And then, Live Journal came along. Live Journal is an online journal — a blog — and people told me, “if you want people to read your stuff, you need to post it on Live Journal.” I resisted that, because I already had my little roadside stand set up (the little wooden shack with the “robohara.com” sign hanging on the side) and I wanted people to come hang out at my place. I didn’t want to hang out at Live Journal, but then I blinked and suddenly Live Journal had three million users. I caved in, signed up for an account, and started cross-posting my blogs on Live Journal. Notice I said “cross-posting” — that means I was posting everything twice, once to robohara.com and once to livejournal.com. This was before automated tools were around to help people do this. I wrote my blog entries in notepad, and then I cut/pasted them into robohara.com, and then I cut/pasted them into Live Journal.

I gained some readers through Live Journal — not enough to migrate to it exclusively but enough that I felt like I couldn’t stop. If the plus side was gaining readers, the downside was that I now had two sets of readers: the robohara.com group and the Live Journal group. I had two sets of conversations going on. I really wanted every to be at robohara.com but … some people preferred Live Journal. So I did it.

And then MySpace came along — glorious, crappy MySpace. I avoided MySpace for as long as I could, but when a non-technical friend of mine informed me that everybody was on MySpace, I signed up. And he was right, everybody was on MySpace. I had people contacting me left and right. “Dude, where ya been?” And I was like, uh, I’ve been at robohara.com, I’m not that hard to find. But the party was at MySpace, and pretty soon I found myself triple posting my blog entries, cut and pasting them from robohara.com and pasting them now at both Live Journal and MySpace. And I got a ton of readers. And I wasn’t happy because my readers were all over the place and I really wanted everybody in one place. I wanted my own little house party.

Eventually my need for building a centralized group of readers outweighed my need to blast my blog entries across the Internet’s bow. I decided a happy middle ground was cross-posting, but routing comments back to robohara.com. I never got cross-posting to MySpace to work with the latest version of WordPress, so I dropped ’em. I did get it to work with LiveJournal; my posts are now automatically copied there, but comments are closed — to comment, people have to come back here, to my house. People complained that MySpace used to e-mail them whenever I posted there. I added e-mail subscriptions here. People complained that they used to follow my posts with RSS feeds. I added RSS Feeds here. Things were good. I was happy.

And then along came Twitter.

Twitter was originally described to me as a “micro-blogging service”, but it certainly wasn’t designed by or for writers. It was born of the text-messaging generation, not mine. There are those who can explain their deepest thoughts in 140 characters. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not one of them.

I checked out Twitter a couple of years ago, back in 2007. I didn’t create an account, but I looked at other people’s and I saw a lot of messages like “going to lunch now” and “OMG good tacos” and “dog died, so sad” and you know … it just wasn’t for me. First of all, it’s all about the phone — sending messages from and receiving them on your phone. I hate that. And second of all, it’s limited by 140 characters. My blog entries (not all, but many) are stories. They’re crafted. They’re written, edited, and posted. I don’t post about my potty breaks because I don’t want to write about them, I don’t think people want to read about them, and I don’t want to read about other people’s. You pooped, good for you.

One of my problems with Twitter is that it pushes information to people — and maybe that’s what some/most people want these days, I dunno. Going back to BBSes for a moment … my BBS never called anybody. People called it. People had to put forth some modicum of effort, however slight, to read my stuff. And again, maybe that’s not the best technique, but in my mind, that means you read what I write because you want to. I don’t spam or pay for ads. You’re here because you want to be here, and I like that relationship. Twittering to me feels like marching around town square with a bull horn, shouting worthless information to people passing by. “ATTENTION CITIZENS. TACOS ARE TASTY. THAT IS ALL.” I can’t imagine sending out messages of that caliber without apologizing for each one. “THIS ICE CREAM IS COLD. I AM SORRY TO HAVE BOTHERED YOU WITH THAT INFORMATION.”

Another problem I have with Twitter is, it breaks up my content. I obviously couldn’t post this in Twitter (way too long) and I wouldn’t spam my blog subscribers with my daily flood of Tweets. That creates a dilemna. If you want to follow everything I’m up to you would have to subscribe to both sources and I’m not sure the average person needs that much Rob O’Hara in their life, Do you?

Now that I’ve told you all the horrible, annoying things about Twitter, let me tell you why I just signed up.

I just saw a cat with half a million followers on Twitter.

Read that again. Half a million people. Following a cat. On Twitter. That’s a lot of people. How can I not get in on that?

It is with shame, apologies, a tiny bit of apprehension, a little bit of guilt and a whole lot of curiosity that I hereby announce my arrival to Twitter. Twitter will be updated whenever I post blog entries here on robohara.com (this should be the first one to appear there, in fact), and I’ll also be updating Twitter with minutia about my life that I can’t imagine most people would possibly care about. I’ll try to make it fun and kooky and enjoyable, just like a cupcake with a spider ring on top of it. My goal is to not split my readers, but rather gain more, and tie everything all together.

Here are four simple ways you can follow me on Twitter:

– You can manually visit my Twitter page and read my updates.

– If you do RSS, here is my Twitter RSS feed.

– If you have a Twitter account, you can add me as a friend and follow me there.

– The right hand column of robohara.com will display my last five “tweets” down near the bottom. That should be plenty.

I guess it’s time to get to poopin’ … and writing about it!

(Note: Any updates I may make to Twitter throughout the day will be done during scheduled breaks and will be sent from my personal cell phone, NOT from any work-owned equipment. And, just to clarify, this website is not updated during business hours or on company time. I work on many of these posts for days and then trigger them to “go public” at a random time the following day. To clear up any misconceptions, I have added post times to my posts and updated my posting script to not turn anything “public” between 8:00am and 4:30pm. I hope that clears up any confusion.)