Question on Twitter

Ok, I still have not found my "voice" on twitter, but I have noticed something. Since I've followed a couple of high profile twitters, I've gotten a lot of people following me now. Now I'm certain it's a case of them wanting to build followers themselves (for the most part). I have no illusions that is is because they are interested in what I have to say.

At first I followed anyone that followed me first. Recently I've stopped doing that and even unfollowed a few, because I'm just not that interested in what they have said and it causes me to miss others that I do want to follow. To little signal-to-noise.

So, should I be following those who simply follow me? It would be great if I could filter the tweets, and do so by default. Or hide those I don't want to see all the time.

What for Twitter?

I signed up for Twitter recently. Mostly it was to get the riksca account, although I don't believe it was at risk. Also, I occasionally run across some writer or such that posts on Twitter that I would like to follow.

Now that I'm there, what do I do? I don't really care to inform the world what I'm doing every hour of the day. If you want to know what I'm having for lunch, call me. Better yet, I'll meet you someplace and we can talk over lunch (has to have a gluten-free menu). It's not that I'm a closed person. Ask me how I'm doing and I'll probably tell you in details you aren't interested in. But I'm also not the type to go out and announce what's going on in my life, as if the world really cared.

I've talked already about being on Facebook. Facebook, for me, has become the "hi, how ya doing" forum. I can keep track of friends near and far, and throw out cool or otherwise pertinent things going on in my life. I had originally tied my Twitter posts to my Facebook posts so they would update each other. After being teased by someone for a rather technical post, I undid that. It will remain that way until I find what I want to write about on Twitter.

Which brings me to the reason for all these means of communication (Blogger, Facebook, Twitter), which is to get practice and time writing. My long term goal is to have a career as a writer (when I say long term, I really mean it. I'm talking 20 years). Yes, I know that time spent on these forums is time I'm not spending writing something I can sell, but it does give me practice writing something for someone else to read. Possibly (if anyone ever reads this), I can even get feedback on my writing.

So back to the point; what will I use Twitter for? Since it's more for me, and not to get a following in a way, I'll continue to post what I'm thinking about, especially if it's something that would benefit from feedback. Eventually, I'm sure I'll find my "voice".

Facebook black hole got me

I don't do computer games much partially because I'm usually in front of the computer for long hours each day programming or writing. Recently my sister got me to signup for Facebook so we can share pictures, etc., of our respective families. Since she still lives in the South and I've been in the Mid-West for a little more than 20 years, we have not kept up as much as I would really like.

I had resisted joining online social sites because of simliar reasons to why I don't do computer games. I'm on the computer a lot anyway, why do I want take more of my social relationships online.

After being on for a little while, I found that I could reconnect to people I went to high school with. People that were important to me more than 20 years ago. I could reconnect, find out how they are doing, what they are doing, and kinda track how things are going for them. It's been a good thing for that, but has really taken a lot of time away from other things I do on a computer. Since I can't give up time programming, as it pays the bills, it has cut drastically into time I should be writing. Hopefully I can recapture some of the time, while still keeping in contact with friends both old and new.

Back to Chrome, for now

Since I've found that Read It Later can be used via bookmarklets, and I've been having some proxy trouble with Firefox, I've tried using Chrome again at work.

I still like the fact that is feels much faster. Everything from launching to browsing to certain pages seems to be snapper than other browsers. However, I've found that a lot of things do not work well in Chrome. So I have to browsers open. I have Chrome typically running my gmail account. Firefox loaded to test my work and also to go to several intranet sites. The latter is especially good because I have IE Tab loaded, and several internal sites only work under IE. With IE Tab, I can load these sites under Firefox, with IE embedded.

What really surprises me is how many Google sites/apps don't work quite right under Chrome, although those seem to get fixed quickly.

Chrome is, for me, becoming a good appliance for several functions, including email and news reading. For a while at least, I will continue to run two browsers.