Do You Twitter?

I have recently started to use Twitter. Admittedly, for someone who calls himself a tech-geek, that is scandalously late in the day, a bit like calling yourself a travel writer when the most exciting place you have been is Dudley. No offence to anyone from Dudley, but it’s awfully boring. I know this for a fact; I went there once to see a man about a car. That lacklustre trip ended at 11.30pm in the car park of Watford Gap Services off the M1, where I found myself alone in the rain with a soggy tuna sandwich and plenty of regrets. But I digress…

So, Twitter. Stirling had been harping on at me for some time to create a Twitter account for The Arbuturian. Apparently it would be good for us, he said. But did I listen? No, dear reader, I was too busy hobnobbing with the rich and famous to notice the outside world and all its glorious technological advances, like mobile phones and electric toothbrushes. It’s a weakness of mine. Hobnobbing, that is.

Now that we have our very own Arbuturian Twitter space, and my very own Jonesy-Omnipotent-Editor Twitter space, I can see just how valuable it is. I’ve made lots of new friends. Well okay, 34 friends at the last count. I’ve wasted lots of my day chuckling at humorous ‘tweets’ from people such as David Mitchell and Lord Fry, Master of the Twits (I presume the singular for a Twitter user is a Twit, non?), but I can see how it could be useful to someone like me, and to an offbeat magazine like ours. We are not trying to reach a mass audience, but our niche readership is very important to us, they make us what we are, so if Twitter is another tool to find them and to keep them happy, then so be it. I’ll be pleased to call myself a Twit (it’ll make a nice change from other people calling me that).

I am discovering a kind of hierarchy of popularity in terms of Twits and their followers (or ‘twollowers’? I’m clutching at straws now). The more people you have following you, the more people want to follow you. It also helps if you’re famous, attractive and / or have something useful to say. Yet you can follow as many people as you like and they won’t necessarily follow you back. At first I found this annoying. If I follow someone then surely the polite thing to do is to follow me back? Jesus didn’t get where he is today by just taking (the church does that for him). But then I discovered that the more people you follow, the more tweets pop up on your homepage (or Tweet-feed, if you use something like TweetDeck). So following lots of people can become detrimental to the act of following someone in the first place.

Last check, His Royal Lordship Stephen Fry was following 54,409 people. His Twitter homepage must be a giddying kaleidoscope of tweets, each one vying for a place on his Lordship’s retinas. Unless you are Johnny-5 or a Cyberdyne Systems T-1000, you haven’t a hope in hell of keeping up with that many tweets. More significantly, when Tweetmaster Fry (the new Funkmaster Flex) tweets back to his followers, 910,800 people see it. That’s impressive. Not even Gordon Brown has that many people listening to him, and he’s supposed to be the PM.

In conclusion then, Twitter is a powerful tool. It mobilises the masses, it can make or break an ego, it gives freedom to an increasingly un-free press, it’s a good networking instrument, and it allows normal people to talk to those special celebrity people who we all know are better than everyone else. Yes, I hate to admit it, but there is a Twitterati, a Twitter clique (or a ‘clitter’? No, that sounds obscene), and you shouldn’t find that surprising. I have journalists and writers following me, because I’m one of them. I follow them back. We’re like a flock of sheep walking around in circles. So as in life, so it is with Twitter. Feel free to follow me; I might just follow you back. You can even post me a public message, and if I see it, I will probably respond. I’m a nice chap like that. Not as nice as Stephen Fry, but who is?

Follow The Arbuturian on Twitter.

Follow Jonesy, the all-seeing editor on Twitter.