Tweetaholism

Assignment: follow a ton of people on Twitter who post, like 50 tweets an hour.

Verdict: I have written about Twitter on this blog multiple times and don't need to really rehash my feelings about the service. It has its usefulness, and as someone who works in a social media immersed environment I have spent a fair amount of time managing it.

If anything all this assignment managed to do was the following:

1. Tweetdeck appeared to be a potentially useful tool
2. There must be a reason its Tweetdeck Beta -- I couldn't get it to download
3. Managing these updates in Twitterfox was a nightmare. This changed the service from providing a few useful posts an hour to an overwhelming and obnoxious quantity of information.

In fact, this assignment may have turned me off to Twitter all together. Since I had already established a pattern of use, disrupting it for this assignment was challenging. I followed a few links here and there, but mostly I couldn't keep up with the pace. I'm wondering of other students also experienced this. It's a challenging time of year to add following the Tweets of Twittaholics on top of all the other work involved in ending a semester. In my case, this was a week of travel and a crazy work schedule that had me away from the computer or completely buried in reading and writing without any time to devote to following the insider company happenings of the Tribune company. (Besides, I am already reading those posts from the public media world).

And then there's the media's obsession with Twitter. With Oprah Winfrey's foray on to the network, its popularity is plummeting its users' cultural capital. And it continues to crack me up that even after I presented my thesis this afternoon – which was on the use of communications technology in street protesting – a couple students came up to me afterwards to say that they know what Twitter is but they have never seen a “real person use it.”

My boyfriend called this obsession by corporate America months ago. “Twitter? Its a thing? Okay, we need three of them. Someone buy us three Twitters.”

Twitter is my information overload realized. Without defining a very limited network of people whose posts interest me, the service mostly drove me crazy. If my sole directive in life was to follow people and determine trends, this would be fine. Alas, I have other things to do.

I never direct messaged anyone or @ed them, because again I had nothing to say. This assignment also came up during a week where I had little to post myself.

Once the ordeal was over I deleted almost everyone from that list, leaving only Jeff Jarvis, Patrick Thorton, and Robert Scoble. We’ll see how long that lasts. I’ve had Twitterfox turned off for a while now so that I could get some work done.