Following, being followed...the following was brought to you by...

I have twittered. I can't say I'm all atwitter about it, not tweet on it, but now out of punny ways to say it.

Our saga begins with the usual joys of our technological world...not getting access to the sight. The fact that they have a cutesy little page that keeps trying to do your command suggests to me that it was not personal, things get slow there. This is probably a sign of how popular twittering is, but...not encouraging.

Eventually I got in, set myself up, tweeted, started stalking...er...following people, got kitsaplibrary to follow me (hacking is easy when they give you the password :)), and got out with minimal scarring. My username is udweller and I left it public if you want to stalk me...not that I promise to say anything profound.

Finding people to follow was annoying because I kept getting the cutesy screen (as opposed to the blue screen of death of M-word fame) and even a different cutesy error screen. I did get results eventually and found some knitters and spinners for following. BUT, I also noticed that a lot of the ones that popped up from my searches had last messages from months ago--one of the messages being that the person was abandoning twitter for facebook and where to find her there. This may be proof that people who are into what I'm into also don't necessarily want to spend their time updating everyone that they are bored at work (as one of the tweets in the public stream did--gee I wonder if their employer twitters?).

I hadn't heard of twitter before 2.0 and I can't say I'm surprised, now that I know what it is. As someone who doesn't have a cell phone, I'm definitely not the target audience here. I can't think of many less pleasant activities than being constantly updated about the least little thing, much less having any urge to constantly update others...it seems awful. I like my peace and quiet. I like to accomplish things without interruptions, at least some of the time.

Reading the info about how it worked made me feel like a crotchety old woman (these damn kids today, with there twittering and tweeting...hey, you kids get off my lawn). I just don't relate to the desire for hyper-stimulation.

The guy in the 12 minute guide actually said something to the effect of...even though studies show constant interruptions cause your IQ to drop, who cares, it's fun. It made me think maybe he'd dropped all the points he had to spare.

The Big Juicy guide had some interesting thoughts on marketing, but I'm one of those who are highly advertising averse (pity the telemarketer that catches me at the wrong moment ) so any of this 'building a relationship with the customer' is annoying to me. For the 'kids' who are 'into this sort of thing' it might be 'just the ticket' (I swear, I'm not 112 year old, I just feel that way). If the 'library web presence' were desirable book review/recommendations (140 characters would have to be a pretty concise review) some people would probably really appreciate the heads up. Then again, they may really only want to know that their friend is going to hang out at the mall or what they ate for lunch, etc. It seems like it could be a lot to maintain if it were super-frequent, but if there were a quickie title recommendation every few days it could work for readers advisory and/or event announcements.

As for me, I predict (OK, I know) that I'll experiment with this a bit more for the duration of 2.0 and then its bye bye birdie (one last play on words, then I'll quit my grousing--hee,hee).

So tweets to the tweet I'm unplugging and flying for the hole.