Twitter

I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but I’m not very active on Twitter any more.

No, it’s not the annoying “While you were away” pseudo-window that is keeping me away.

Nor is it the Facebook-esque ‘heart’ button (WTF?).

Nor is it the endless supply of advertising bots and idiots that seem to frequent the service (I have most of them filtered out)  

It’s not even the regular misaddressed tweets meant for the Thirsty Bear Brewing Co in San Fransisco (fine fellows, and purveyors of fine beery comestibles that they are!)

Nope. None of the above. It’s the distraction.

On 5th November 2008, at 0525 (allegedly - I suspect there’s some sort of timezone shenanigans going on there…those who know me realise I am not a morning person) I wrote my first Tweet: "Trying out this Twitter thing….”)

Since that date I’ve got involved in all kinds of interesting discussions, mostly around software development, and often with the Great and the Good of the agile community - for which I am extremely grateful since I consider myself to be more "average chaotic neutral", with some habits that (mostly!) keep me from the Dark Side 😃.  Has it been useful? Yes. Has it been fun? Hell, yeah! Did it take far too much of my time? Oh yes!

The immediacy of Twitter meant that I was being dragged into endless conversations. Discussions that had more in common with IRC realtime chat than simply idle Post-It notes on a wall somewhere. They needed immediate attention. Which meant that I was wasting a huge amount of time. I could give up at any time…but…just …one…more…reply… 

So I’ve took a bit of a hiatus, and found out that the world didn’t end. The sky didn’t fall in. I could still find things out. I could still have discussions. But I had time. I had found that Twitter was actually getting in the way of what I want to do - work with good people to deliver cool stuff. 

I haven’t given it up completely, but I won’t be using Twitter anywhere near as much as I used to. My last serious tweet was October 2015, and I have not really missed the interaction. I will be keeping an eye on it to see if I can improve the ROI, suggestions gratefully received - but best use the comments to this post rather than use Twitter.....