Twittering Jonny Malbon

I frequently bore readers, friends, relatives or anyone within earshot to death about social media. I am bit of a junkie in this regard.

The one thing I have not wrapped my head around is Twitter. I subscribed to it a year or so ago and have not used it much. I occasionally get someone "following" me (the somewhat creepy action by which another Twitter subscriber connects to you). It's mostly people I know but from time to time, total strangers start "following" me. It's a little weird but it must be quite disappointing for them, as I rarely tweat (the verb of a Twitter post, the tweat).

Even in my more exciting moments I am hardly worth following. My tweats are along the lines of "Train late again"; "Got to work"; "Doing email"; "Going to the airport", "In a taxi"; "In a business meeting"... Not exactly Tom Clancy.

Candidly, I find the whole thing a little too strange. I am not that interested that John Doe is "brushing his teeth" or Jane Smith is "enjoying a vanilla latte". Whoop Di Doo. It must be a generational thing. My Gen X and Y friends (yes, I have some) obsess about it, although my Millenial son thinks it's creepy too.

Lately though, I started to give it a second look. During the Mumbai terrorist attacks there were reports of Twitter feeds being used to keep people abreast of what was going on. Today though I really started to get interested in it.

I was on Jonny Malbon's great blog. Jonny is racing in the Vendee Globe on Artemis. It's his first Vendee and he is in 14th place as of the time of this post, approaching the latitude of Australia.

Jonny has a twitter feed on his blog. This to me sounded like a Twitter feed worth following. I am following Jonny and will let you know how I get on.

Comments

[Edward]

I actually follow a bunch of NPR style comedians who are using twitter for sometimes funny sometimes annoyingly self-referential jokes. I also update Facebook with it.

Mostly twitter is about iPhones and what you're having for lunch.

http://twitter.com/evk4

[Michael]

can't say I see any advantage to tweating over posting to facebook or a blog.

[O Docker]

I'm beginning to think maybe prehensile thumbs weren't such a good idea.