Twitter

(from Flickr user Miss Karen)

On March 30, 2007, I sent my first tweet (a Twitter update if you didn't know). Nothing groundbreaking, to be polite. I even misspelled Twitter. There weren't a lot of people I knew on Twitter at that time, so I didn't really use it again for five months or so. I'm not about to read all of my old posts, but I was scrolling through a few pages to see what I've talked about and found:

if the cd gets stuck in your car stereo, you had better REALLY like it

For a while, I was following and being followed mostly by library folks. It was a nice little community where we could post questions to each other, and get back responses, and so on. I belong to message boards and list servs, and all that jazz, but there was something more fulfilling about getting back responses only from people you knew and respected.

Then the publishing people I knew started getting into it and my following/follower list started to get more expansive. I'm following enough people know that's it hard to keep up with the conversation. At least it's easy to look at @reponses to my tweets to see when people are talking directly to me.

But as many of you know, Twitter has gained a lot of popularity over the past few months. I'm not sure exactly what it was, but it could be nothing more than the fact that more and more people are discovering it along with more websites and celebrities using it.

I've only recently started following celebrities, and it's actually been kind of fun. And surreal. It's one thing to listen to a CD, watch a football game, read a book, see a movie, even read a blog post from a celebrity. It's another thing entirely to read a tweet from them. With all the other things, there was a lot of time and effort put into them before I saw/experienced them. With a tweet, I know that the person just typed it in and sent it. It's like I got a text message from them.

I know, I know. That's the point. But the other night I was working in my office at home when @aplusk starting to send a fair amount of tweets. Yes, that's Ashton Kutcher. Kelso. The Punk'd dude. The, Dude Where's My Car? dude. But to sit at my desk and see these updates and KNOW that he was typing them as I sat there...it was strange.

Yes, of course, he's not writing to me. But it was like I was eavesdropping on a conversation. Even when I lived out East and worked in Manhattan, I didn't have much occasion to meet/see famous people. Certainly no opportunity to interact with them.

You see, Mr. Kutcher was talking with Mila Kunis and fielding questions from Twitter that he could ask her. You see, you can @someone on Twitter and they can see who's responded to their tweets. With >800,000 followers, I can only imagine what Mr. Kutcher's @tab looks like. But, he was interacting with...whomever wrote to him. What a cool, and safe, way for a celebrity to interact with his fan base.

Other than writer people that I already know, I've never gotten a response from anyone even remotely famous via Twitter. Of course, this isn't the only reason why I twitter, but I'm not ashamed to admit that there is some small part of me that wants to be validated in such a way. And if Ashton Kutcher is not your bag, there's people like Stephen Fry, Russell Brand, Stephen Page, Olivia Munn, Jamie Oliver, David Lynch, and so on. You can even follow companies like DIRECTV or Netflix and ask them customer service questions.

I don't know why this is such a revelation to me, it was just something to consider that I was seeing these tweets because the celebrity had written it at that moment. Not yesterday, not earlier, but almost exactly at the same time I was seeing it. There's something almost overwhelming to me about the immediacy of it all.

And it's weird, too, to be excited about this, about being a small weird part of a celebrity's life (just like anyone else who follows them, they don't have to approve me following them so it's not special that I do so) when I actively hate the celebrity magazines and television shows.

Perhaps it's that this is celebrity on my own terms, in my place. I'm choosing who I get to learn about, whose life I get to eavesdrop on, rather than being forced to hear about relationships and music and movies that I don't care about. I suspect that's what it is at this point.

I'll never meet Ashton Kutcher or Stephen Fry or whomever, nor will they ever reply to my reply to their tweet (since it's extraordinarily unlikely that they will ever follow me on Twitter), but that's not really the point.

I mostly use Twitter as an easy way to stay in touch with publishing/library folks who are all over the place (literally when it comes to @agamisu). And it's a great way to communicate with folks when I go to conventions when I don't necessarily know everyone's phone # to send txt messages (or when you change phone # like I did).

Unlike Twitter, there is no limit to the characters I use on Blogger, so I'm going to cut myself off and write some 140 character or less sentences. Bye!