The Twitter Bug

So a few months back, I signed up for Twitter.  I installed some kind of plugin to my hosted WordPress blog that was supposed to automatically “tweet” my blog posts for me as I made them, and that’s about the last time I thought of it.  Then I discovered Plinky, a delightful procrastination tool, which also allows posts to Twitter.  Still, I didn’t do much but follow back the people who followed me, which seemed like the polite thing to do–even though I didn’t actually follow anything.  How in the world did I have time to read all these random snippets?

Well sometime this week I read somewhere (and I think it was on one of J.A. Konrath’s blog tour posts somewhere), that Twitter was like a giant IM with a whole bunch of people.  It was like a lightbulb went off.

Oh, it’s supposed to be a conversation?

So yesterday afternoon I logged back in, determined to figure this Twitter thing out.  Courtesy of Pot, I discovered Twitterfeed, which takes over doing what my old plugin did and tweets my blog posts.  I figured I might as well tweet this blog as well as my cooking blog because, hey, both are big parts of my life.  Then I found a desktop client to download that would allow me to follow all the tweeting (because I can’t stay on the website all day).  Then I did a little poking around for some fellow writers I knew I’d like to “tweet” with, began following them and looked over their latest tweets.  And then Pot introduced me to Tweetlater, which has all sorts of nifty tools to make this form of procrastination easier to manage and less time consuming.  Somewhere in the middle of a volley about titanium sporks (the MacGyver-like weapon of choice against a zombie attack), I finally started to get it.

This was what I used to love about random IMing back in college, when I’d talk to random people around the world (because, you know, I had TIME to do that in college).

God help me, I’ve joined the dark side.

So yeah, if you want to follow me, here’s my Twitter page.