A Year Later, Twitter

One year and 2,605 tweets later…

I didn’t realize it had been one year since I jumped at the microblogging bandwagon. A tweet was directed to me earlier this afternoon by @jak_twop_1000,  which I thought at first to be a machine, but turned out to be conversational. My foray into the Twitter world turned out to be fun (aside from the occasional “floods”) and very useful. I have been using Twitter primarily as news aggregator just like Google Reader or similar RSS aggregators. That’s why I didn’t tweet that much (you think 2,605 is a lot? well, wait until you see 10,000+ tweets of my friends, yeah those in just a year).

The aggregator thing works because I follow several Twitter accounts belonging to a news station and field experts. Therefore, all I need to do in mid-afternoon at work or night at home is look at their tweets to get the latest updates and links. I can then follow the link to more comprehensive writing. For this purpose, I use a software application instead of directly reading them from Twitter. This is because Twitter has limited showings, and it takes a bit longer to show more tweets. Plus, the app allows me to flag the tweets I like and read them some other time. The software I used is Socialite by Realmac, which was EventBox before they got bought by Realmac. Honestly, I kinda like EventBox better because it had fewer bugs and caused less stress.

Second, I also use Twitter as a bookmark, like del.icio.us. The way it works is that I put a favorite star on those tweets I like to bookmark or tweets those articles I found on the web myself. This is why my tweets are dominated by finance and investment-related news and websites.

What’s for the next year? Well, more or less the same, unless I got the sudden urge to post more of my original writings. Until next year…