Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
::Today's soundtrack: Red Flag "If I Ever" ::
One of the very few online community thingies I am involved in is the Twitter. Of course, you knew that, especially because as of this writing there is a Twitter widget dealie in the side bar. That should have made it obvious. I am involved with Twitter, but not MySpace or Facebook. Why is that? Well, allow me to go over the things I like, and dislike, about that Twitter.
What I like:
I like that it is quick blurbs. If you only have a few minutes to check your Twitter page, knowing that the messages are short make me feel more confident in getting to read everything in a short span of time. Sometimes I want to check my e-mail "real quick" only to find several people have written me long, involved e-mails that I do not have time for at the moment. Sure I'll come back to it, but I feel a little guilty knowing it's there and purposefully not reading it.
Some people have made the argument that if you Twitter you may as well just text or instant message. The great thing about Twitter is that I check it when I'm good and ready. I don't have to be interrupted while doing something else to get the message, nor do the people who send Twitter messages expect instant replies. It's all pretty casual, and I like that.
Twitter allows you a means of direct contact with actual famous people and it doesn't seem stalkery. You might say that you could friend the same celebrity of Facebook or MySpace, or whatever, but Twitter allows you to reply to a Tweet a famous person made, and sometimes they actually write back (this has happened to me).
The nifty hashtag feature allows you to make a word or phrase a "keyword." This is helpful in that you can click hashtagged keywords to see who else incorporated that keyword in their Tweets, and therefore see who else is talking about the same things as you in the same relative time frame. I found this to be neat when I was using Twitter while watching the Lost finale on television. I could see who else was watching and what they thought of the confusing series conclusion.
It's a very easy way to promote me and my website and other things I might be doing of interest. When I update this website, I post it on the Twitter. Last week (as of original posting of this Rant) when I did a guest comic strip for someone else's website, I promoted that on my Twitter, too. I figure if you're following me, you have to be a LITTLE bit interested in what I do at least some of the time.
Retweeting is pretty cool in that you can spread someone else's Tweeted message that you think is worthy of sharing to your followers. This is helpful when cross-promoting your friends' websites and/or contests, or just sharing cool sayings or funny jokes. I retweet when my friends post about their website updates and they retweet mine; we help each other through this useful function!
What I don't like:
Some people use it to post utter nonsense over and over again, in rapid succession, clogging up my home page. I like to, and pride myself on, reading ALL of the Tweets that the people I follow post. Yes, I do in fact read them all. If I wasn't at least a little bit interested in what you had to say, then I wouldn't be following you. Every so often, though, some of these people will deem it necessary to post a Tweet every few seconds and it has to do with something I know nothing about. This isn't so bad if I happen to have Twitter open at that time, but if I'm logging in for the first time that day and I'm going through my back-log of Tweets, it can be pretty frustrating to find several pages of three word Tweets from one person comprised entirely of seeming gibberish.
This is probably my biggest peeve: people who follow others just so they will follow them back. Look, I understand the need to build a following, I really do. Heck, I want more people to follow me, too. The thing is, DO NOT follow me and EXPECT me to follow you back and then UNFOLLOW me two days later because I didn't follow you. This isn't cool, okay? You should follow someone because you like them or find them interesting or funny or cool, or whatever. That's why *I* follow everyone I do. Following me in the hopes that I will blindly follow you in return in order to bolster your own number of followers is lame and stupid. I'm GLAD you unfollowed me if that's the only reason you did it to begin with.
Unfortunately, like every other community on the internets, there are spam-bots. Oh well.
I follow people that I like. This is true, but I also UNFOLLOW people who I feel no longer deserve it. One thing I enjoy about reading tweets is that you get some pretty interesting or funny things from time to time. I have UNFOLLOWED people for being vapid and boring and also for NEVER TWEETING. I adore Robert Smith's music, but HE NEVER TWEETED. Not even once! Why should I continue to follow him? With the hopes that one day he might grace us all with a tweet? I understand WHY he had the account even though it wasn't used: he needed to reserve the account so that fans would know all others were fakers. Of course people set up accounts in the name of a celebrity and pretend to be them; this is what boring people do to light up their lives. Therefore, actual celebrities feel the need to create official accounts they never use. This is good and bad at the same time. Good so that we know who "the real" celebrity is, bad in that some celebrities set it up and don't use it. Ah well. (Maybe this paragraph should be in the "like" section? I dunno.)
I guess that's that, and it seems the "like" section wins out over "dislike", hence my continued usage of the Twitter. Now why don't you sign up and follow me, eh? It's pretty neat and I Tweet pretty much every day. Try it; you'll like it!
William the Bloody (tweeted)
comments powered by Disqus