What’s the point of Twitter?

When I first joined Twitter, I didn’t understand it.  At all.  It took me a while before I even signed up.  I remember seeing the weird commercial where some guy with an accent was talking about “tweeting” and I thought “what the hell is that all about?”  I was very content with Facebook at the time and saw no need for Twitter.  It was just an unnecessary social media platform that I did not need in my life.  There was no point.

I’m not sure why I finally caved and decided to start a Twitter account.  I don’t remember when I started it.  Two years ago?  Something like that.  I didn’t really use it for the first while that I had it.  I thought it was stupid.  It was basically like Facebook, but with only status updates.  And nothing else.  And you couldn’t even like the statuses, you had to retweet or favourite them.  I couldn’t be bothered with that.  And I wasn’t very good at obtaining followers.  Probably because I didn’t tweet enough to be deemed worthy of following.

I also didn’t like the fact that I was limited to only using 140 characters.  What if I had more to say?  What then?  I hate limitations.  And having to shorten my words.  I try as hard as I possibly can to have proper grammatical sentences, even when using Twitter.  But I found myself having to use “b” instead of “be”, “2day” instead of “today” and “u” instead of “you”.  And sometimes even then, I was over the limit.  I hated it.

Somewhere, somehow, my opinion drastically changed.  I don’t know how or when this happened.  But today, I tweet all the time.  ALL the time.  Maybe it happened about the same time when I began to generate more and more Facebook statuses, more than the average person.  I suppose I then decided that I may as well use those statuses on Twitter as well.  Why not?

It took me a while to figure everything out.  It wasn’t until last year that I finally learned the concept of a hashtag.  And then I went overboard with it.  I didn’t fully understand it.  A few people have mentioned how odd or long my hashtags were at times.  I would just run together a bunch of words at the end of my tweets #whywouldinotdothatitmakesperfectsensetome.

When I first set up the account, my username was @frosty_rain.  Which is lame, I know.  It was based on my email address that I set up back in Grade 8.  When I was lame.  I have since changed it to @d_vaz, because that at least incorporates my initial and last name.  Not that anyone cares either way.  Should I change it again?  Would that confuse people?  It’s better than using my whole name.  Because if I were to make it @dominiquevaz, if someone were to reply to my tweets, they would use up precious characters just typing it in.  Best to keep it short.

I recently wondered whether I should have multiple twitter accounts.  Which I now do.  My main one, and now one for this blog, and one for my other blog.  Which I haven’t really done much with yet.  But @randomandunnews and @whatarewewatch now exist in addition to @d_vaz.  Whether I will do anything with them, is another question.

I still hate the limitations that Twitter has.  I refuse to link my Twitter and my Facebook.  Because I often need to modify my Facebook statuses in order to allow them to fit the 140 character limit on Twitter.  And I don’t want Twitter’s strict character count rule to influence the length of my Facebook updates.  Not going to happen.  But I have learned to deal with the limitation on Twitter.  Because now that I have a blog, I can write however the hell much I want.