My Twitter turnaround

I was wrong about Twitter.

There, I said it.

For the longest time, I was probably one of Twitter’s more vocal critics.  I absolutely could not see the point of it.  As far as I could tell from media and other coverage, Twitter merely provided a platform for narcissistic, irrelevant posturing from celebrities and wanna-be’s.  I don’t care what Paris Hilton or Ashton Kutcher are doing.  No, I really, really don’t.  To make matters worse, such posturing had to be done in 140 characters or less.  Given that ppl ritng lik ths in text messages or on the internet annoys the hell out of me, that particular feature wasn’t likely to endear me to the product any more. The silly names (tweets? tweeps? what the … ?) and esoteric punctuation (@ this and # that) seemed to confirm my suspicions about the target audience.  From the outside, Twitter appeared to be some kind of teenaged version of Facebook at best and a marketing tool for clueless PR departments at worst, and despite protestations from a couple of workmates in particular I wasn’t even inclined to try it.

And then I started blogging regularly.  Not the ‘today I got drunk in Hanoi’ style of travelogue that I’d done to keep family and friends amused on my last round the world trip, but travel articles aimed at a wider audience.  Like all emerging bloggers who produce what they perceive to be the most amazing piece of literature since Hemmingway only to see it disappear into the void without a trace, I figured that publicising my posts beyond that small group of people might help sustain my desire to continue writing.  Several other bloggers and websites recommended Twitter as a great way of driving traffic to your site, but still I resisted. Eventually, however, I decided to try it out – but still swearing vehemently that I was only doing this to advertise my site, nothing more, and against my better judgement.

From almost the first day, however, I noticed something strange happening.  I was connecting with people.  People I actually wanted to talk to.  People who had something interesting to say about a subject I loved – travel.  I was discovering more and more great articles, blogs and bloggers each day, and my RSS reader soon jumped from the dozen or so sites that I had been following to the 50+ that I subscribe to today.  Of course I now never have time to actually read them all, but that’s another story.  Questions were being thrown out and answered, handy tips filled the virtual airwaves and I found myself starting to seriously engage with a fun, dynamic and vibrant community of travellers, both those who blog and those who aren’t quite so attached to their laptops.

I finally got what all the hype was about, and realised the fundamental fact that I’d been missing about Twitter all along.  While I’m sure that tens or hundreds of thousands of banal, pointless, mind numbingly dull tweets flow through the system each day – short messages that would undoubtedly make me a just little stupider every time I read them were I so inclined – the vital point is that I just don’t see them.  By choosing who I follow with care and focussing entirely on a particular niche that I am passionate about – travel in my case, although I’m sure it could be just about anything from knitting macramé blankets to underwater baseball -  Twitter for me has been transformed from a place best used to find out what Justin Bieber had for breakfast into a vital source of news and information.  Never was this more obvious than just yesterday, as the protests in Bangkok took a dramatic turn for the worse.  The first place I turned for breaking details was not the television, radio or mainstream news sites.  Without even thinking about it, I went to Twitter – and rightly so.  Although like any eye-witness account things were confused and haphazard, with rumours and speculation flying everywhere, the reports and photos from people on the ground gave a far better picture of the situation for several hours than any other source.  I’ll certainly be going to it again in a couple of months as I decide when, where and whether to cross the border into Thailand as I travel around South East Asia, that’s for sure.

As my time spent on the site has gone from weeks to months, connecting with new people and sharing links, tips and stupid jokes in equal measure along the way, it seems that I’ve gained so much more than just another social media outlet for brazen self-promotion.  Much more immediate than Facebook and surprisingly, in some ways more revealing about the individual due to that very immediacy, I feel like I know at least a little about the members of my Twitter community despite having physically met very few of them.  That situation seems likely to change during my upcoming trip, however, with catch-ups loosely planned in Vietnam and Spain at this stage and undoubtedly more to come along the way.  If you can’t really get to know someone well by throwing a few dozen tomatoes at them during La Tomatina, then how can you, I ask?

So there you have it.  I’m unashamedly a Twitter convert.  Now that’s a phrase I never, ever thought I’d utter.  Like travel itself, it appears that the best way to approach this was with an open mind and a willingness to give it a go.

Who would have thought…..

If you want to see what I’m on about for yourself, my Twitter nickname is @driftingkiwi