However, I’m not down on social media; I guess you could say I’m “down with it.” I’m just making some changes to the way I use it. Here they are:

Flickr

I once said I felt chained to Flickr. Well, I certainly don’t feel that way anymore. Coincidentally, I also haven’t had a photo in Explore in over a year. What I have realized, although I suspected it before, is that Explore is really just a popularity contest. It has nothing to do with the quality of your photos (though it may have something to do with the quality of your photos); it’s really generated by how many times you comment and fave other Flickrites’ photos and therefore how many people comment and fave your photos– and how quickly. If you don’t spend much time on Flickr looking at other people’s photos and commenting and faving them, others are not likely to spend much time reciprocating. I know that the photos I take now are just as good as the ones I used to take–if not better–but all I do anymore is post a photo or set of photos, and when I have time force myself to comment and fave other people’s photos so as to do unto others as I would have others do unto me. If I add photos to a group, I will view some other photos in that group and comment and fave the ones I like. If I admin a group, I will look through the group and thank a few members for sharing certain photos.

I’m not disingenuous— I only comment, fave, and thank if I really like the photos, but I must admit it often feels like an obligation, because I barely have enough time to share photos on Flickr anymore much less look at others. My conscience tells me, though, that if everyone who posted photos to Flickr never looked at anyone else’s, Flickr would be all artists and no appreciators. Yet even that’s not entirely true, because there are plenty of “lurking” Flickr members and plenty of nonmembers who view Flickr photos— they don’t produce; they just consume.

Once in a while, a friend of mine on Facebook will post some photos to Flickr, I will see the link to those photos, and I will go and have a look. Sometimes this is just to be reciprocal, but usually it’s because I’m genuinely interested in the photos. If I’m really not interested, I don’t look. Also, I almost never post photos to Flickr “friends only” or “friends and family only” because all my friends and family are on Facebook now, which leads me to the next social media channel…

Facebook

I’ve said before that, for me, Flickr was for photographers and Facebook was for friends. In the past year, this has become slightly less true. I still love the way Flickr puts geotagged photos on the map and shows the keywords you assign your photos as searchable tags, but I’ve become less interested in EXIF data, since by now I know what ISO, aperture, and shutter speed are required to make certain photos. And Facebook now shows photos in high resolution, which makes the quality of the images just about as good as the viewing quality on Flickr. I also have more photographer friends on Facebook now who have expanded their artistic photo sharing from Flickr to Facebook , especially when they have Facebook Pages.

Facebook Pages

As you may remember, I resisted Facebook Pages for a while until I decided to get a Facebook Page of my own. Several photographers I know also have Facebook Pages, and I “Like” their Pages so I can see the photographs they’re sharing and how they use their Pages to promote their work. Facebook also just upgraded Pages so that Page owners can browse Facebook with their Page accounts and Like or Comment other Page owners’ content, which is another way not only to reciprocate but promote your own work by leaving your mark on others. I just tried this out for the first time last night right after they came out with it, and it seems like a good feature, though I do not plan to abuse it. I think a little social networking and namedropping is okay, but too much of that is just spamming, and I am no spammer.

Not that I would call it spam, but one thing that has led me to Unlike certain people’s and organizations’ Pages is when they add so much content so often that it floods my News Feed. A recording artist I Liked posted updates every few minutes sometimes, saying things like, “I just mopped my kitchen floor in roller skates!” It got obnoxious. I visited the Page to Unlike it and I noticed one of the fans had commented, “Stop clogging my news feed with updates every five minutes!” There are other organizational Pages that seem to make it a point to update at least once a day just to stay relevant even though all they have to say is, “It’s cold here today, but the flowers are still in bloom. Come out and see the Garden!”– along with photos and stories that take up too much space in my News Feed. When that happens, I tend to Unlike that organization’s Page but follow them on Twitter instead, where they can only write 140 characters. Speaking of Twitter…

Twitter

As I’ve said before, I don’t care how many followers I have or how many tweets I post. I might post a few times a week, once a day, or a few times a day during special events. I also don’t follow nearly as many people as I used to. When I first signed up, I invited friends to join Twitter, and some of them joined but only used it a few times and stopped. I stopped following them because there was nothing to follow. I also stopped following people who posted too often, especially when they weren’t really my friends but just people I met once at Tweetups. As of this writing, I only follow 15 people and 11 organizations– though I might follow a couple more organizations I just Unliked on Facebook.

Foursquare

Bah. I don’t need to tell the world where I am just to earn badges or become a “Mayor.” I don’t use Foursquare anymore; I use Facebook Places now, and only to update my friends when I’m at special places for special occasions. Besides, Facebook just introduced Deals, so if I really want to play the customer loyalty game I’ll try it. I don’t know, though– I like to check in to tell friends of my adventures, not to advertise for businesses.

YouTube

Not much change there, really, except that I changed my channel from azsingersigner to danieljamesgreene.

Have you changed the ways you use social media? I would love to hear how.

Sometimes I want to talk with people in person about how we talk with people on the Internet. I know I can get very “meta”– I mean, look at my website, where I sometimes blog about blogging—but I think it’s very important that we take some time to talk about how we’re talking. When I say “blogging” and “talking” I’m talking about any kind of media that you share with people on the Internet. Whatever you put out there, you are in effect “talking” to people. When you write comments, fave or “Like” something, rate something, etc., you’re talking to people. You produce and consume enough of these social media (photos, videos, stories, updates, links, comments, etc.), and you’re talking with people. But you’re not talking with them in real life, and you’re not even talking with them in real time. The communication is abstracted and asynchronous.

This evening, I went out with my husband Andy to a local brewery for something called #evfn, or East Valley Friday Night. As the description says, “Some folks calls it a tweetup. I calls it an #evfn. Remember the agenda: no agenda. Have fun. Meet people. Party on!” I’ve been to several of these, well, I calls ‘em Tweetups, and sometimes they can get pretty meta about social media. How do we share updates? Photos? Videos? Personal stuff? Work stuff? What kinds of relationships are made, bettered, or broken online? How do we bring those online relationships offline and vice versa? I love talking about that kind of stuff. In fact, no matter what I’m doing at the moment, I have an intense need to talk about it with others who are doing the same thing and are willing to talk it all out.

“Remember the agenda: no agenda.” I can accept that. I know that some of these people work in social media and Internet industries, so they might be tired of talking about their work. I understand that. People need loosely structured milieux where they can just relax, mingle, and–in the words of Auntie Mame–”Circulate, Patrick, circulate.” And sometimes, sometimes, to “circulate” is just what I want to do. But other times I want a rap group– a structured, moderated discussion. That’s what I wanted tonight.

I did get a bit of what I wanted. When I first got there, we sat around a table and talked about various things including employment, health care, spousal benefits, and how unfair it is that I have to pay a “Domestic Partnership Offset Tax” to keep Andy on my health care plan. We all talked for a while at that one table, and somehow the conversation got around to social media, though I don’t remember whether I steered it in that direction or not. People talked a bit about whether they feed their updates to Facebook from Twitter, whether they share personal updates on Facebook or keep it acceptable for business associates, whether to have a separate Twitter account for protected tweets, etc.

Then I brought up my dilemma about the photo I asked the waiter to take of us (shown above). I said, “Nowadays I could post every bit of media I create to so many channels that I sit there with something for a few minutes thinking, ‘should I post it to my Facebook personal profile, my Facebook Page, Flickr, Twitpic…??’” One person gave an answer in the form of, “This is what you do…” and I felt like it was a move to lay the question to rest. Then more people showed up and the conversation got dropped. I tried to pick it up again and the person who had answered before gave me a card and wrote on it “Read [with three underlines] convinceandconvert.com Jay Baer.” That was the end of the conversation. I felt shut down. I really can’t complain, though. I was probably “holding them hostage” on a topic they no longer wanted to talk about. I was probably the one who was out of order, trying to create an agenda when there was no agenda.

I get that people want the freedom to talk about whatever they want to talk about with whoever they want to talk about it with. I have no problem with it. What I do have a problem with is that I read and read and read but I don’t get a chance talk and talk and talk.

I need a forum for discussion– a structured, moderated, real life, real time conversation about social media. I need to listen to people’s personal experiences with social media and I need to talk about mine. I don’t want the conversation to be about how to “drive traffic” and “target markets” and “strengthen your brand.” I just want to sit around with people who create and share a lot of stuff on the Internet not because they want to make money but just because they want to share. The question for me is: how do we share things with other people. I don’t think that reading another article or attending a social media lecture or listening to a panel discussion is going to satisfy me. I want a rap group with an agenda. Anybody know of one?

[P.S. I spent two hours working on this post last night until my husband literally whined (it's our thing, we mimic our dogs) for me to come to bed at 11. I thought I clicked "Publish" but I actually clicked "Save Draft" which is just as well because I lay in bed worried about what I had written and whether it would hurt anyone's feelings or hurt my standing with the group. I just kept replaying the post over and over in my head while Adam Young's voice singing Alaska played over and over in my head. Tormented, I am. This morning, I woke up early and could not get back to sleep. Again with the blog post and song tormenting me. So I got up to look at this blog post and realized I hadn't published it. Great! Gives me more time to make it right. Now I'm sitting here on the sofa with my laptop over my legs and our dog Buxley swatting my arm with his paw to get my attention. And now it's an hour-and-a-half later and I think I might just be ready to publish this thing whether it's perfect or not and whether or not it ruffles any feathers.]

As I was saying, anybody know of a real life, real time rap group about social media? What ways do you find to have meaningful and satisfying conversations with people who are doing what you are doing and learning to do it well? Can you give me an example of how one of these conversations changed you and made your life easier?

Have you seen all the blogs with the tweets / retweet buttons? They make it very easy to spread the word about the blog posts you like, don’t they? Great SEO for bloggers, too. I wanted these buttons for my blog so I did some searching to find out how to add them. Here’s what I found.

Mirella McCracken had the easiest how to add a retweet button tutorial I’ve found; in fact, she had the only correct answer I have found anywhere! (Where did she get it, I wonder?)

I can add to Mirella’s post by saying that the answer is a shortcode. WordPress developed these since they don’t allow embedded scripts in WordPress.com blogs for security reasons. I learned about shortcodes when I moved my blogs from WordPress.org to WordPress.com. In a WordPress.com blog post, you can use a simple shortcode to embed a YouTube video or a Flickr video. What I didn’t know about was the TweetMeme shortcode.

The TweetMeme shortcode for WordPress.com looks like this:

For example, my twitter name is danielgreene, so my shortcode for “_# of_ tweets / retweet” button would be

It’s really quite easy. Facebook “Like” buttons, on the other hand, are not so easy. There is no shortcode for Facebook links that I know of yet. There are a few ways to get that “Like” button on your WordPress.com blog posts, but these services, such as GetSocial Live, require you to individually enter blog post titles and URLs into a web form to get a different button for each blog post. Then these buttons send the visitor who clicks them to a different page where they have to click something else. Sorry, but no. Not easy and seamless enough for me. I will wait until WordPress comes up with a Facebook shortcode; until then, I’m happy with the TweetMeme shortcode for Twitter.

Do you have a favorite method of helping your visitors spread the word about your blog posts?

I like the daily digest of updates for the following reasons:

• My updates are my writings (sometimes even haiku), and I want them on my blog.
• It gives people another way to follow me on my blog rather than having to look elsewhere.
• If by any chance Twitter turns out to be a fad, I will have a record of my Twitter updates on my blog, which has been around since 1996 and I hope will be around at least another 13 years.
• I carefully craft my @replies to be entertaining and/or informative to a global audience; otherwise, I send direct messages. Thus, I’m not worried about littering my blog with meaningless drivel.
• Twitter is microblogging, so what better place for it than my blog?
• If people see one day of my Twitter updates, they may like what they see and consider following me

I took part in an interesting phenomenon today. I was riding the light rail home from work when I checked Twitter using Twidroid on my T-Mobile G1 with Google. An update suddenly appeared from Sheila Bocchine (sheilabocchine on Twitter and daisyjellybean on Flickr) that read, "I have all the necessary paperwork for my visa complete!! Yay!! Now for lunch at Mrs. White’s Golden Rule Cafe!!"

I’ve wanted to try Mrs. White’s Golden Rule Cafe for a couple of years now, and I’ve seen it many times lately while passing it on the eastbound train on Jefferson at 8th Street. I just happened to be on Washington and 24th Street when I read her latest tweet, so I was only blocks away from the restaurant. I sent her a direct message saying, "Like company for lunch? I’m on the Metro in that direction right now! =)". I didn’t hear back right away, so I sent another, "I am at 12th st & Washington right now", and finally, "I got off the train. If now’s not a good time, I can get the next one." Luckily, I got a direct message from her as I stood on the station platform that said, "come on over!! We just ordered!" Thus we had a spontaneous Tweetup.

This is one of the things Twitter is good for. I haven’t seen Sheila in person in a long time, and I’ve never met her man Gary Millard (garymillard on Twitter and garymillard13 on Flickr). I would never have known she were going to a restaurant near me if I hadn’t read her update on Twitter. I’ve long admired Sheila for showing her photos in galleries, and I was able to pick her brain a bit about how she does that. She gave me some good pointers to follow up on. I hope I added value to her day as well. I believe that spending time with people has benefits we can’t even see at the time and sometimes do not realize until years later. And I also believe that there are values to socializing that cannot be measured, so our coming together spontaneously like this was a good thing in ways we may never know.

Have you ever participated in spontaneous meetups like this? How have you harnessed technology to enhance your social life? I’d like to hear other people’s experience with either Twitter or any other technology that has brought them together with other people.

I define geeks as the people who create the latest technology and early adopters as the first people to use it. I have read geeks’ writings and conversed with them on the Internet, such when I participated in the newsgroup comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html in 1996. I learned HTML and CSS by reading, asking questions, and eventually answering questions. I became one of a handful of people in the world to publish a web page in HTML using CSS in August 1996. Yet I didn’t become a professional Web developer. I didn’t become a recognized “expert” in the field (unless you count being interviewed by Wired in 1998). Why? Because I’m not a geek. I don’t take well to sitting for hours in front of a computer screen hacking code. I don’t know any of the languages it takes to write CSS that can render properly in any web browser; i.e. I can’t use JavaScript to insert “browser-sniffing” code that delivers CSS written for each browser’s idiosyncratic (read “faulty” or “noncompliant”) way of rendering CSS… But I digress.

My point is: I’m not a geek; I’m an early adopter. And it causes me angst, because I’m a lot more geeky than most people, yet I’m not geeky enough for the geeks. It’s sort of like my IQ: my intelligence is above average, but I’m not a genius. I’m smarter than most people and not as smart as the geniuses I admire.

Twitter seems to be a place where geeks and early adopters collide. Or maybe collude. Ha ha. I guess you have to be a little geeky to spend any real time on Twitter; you have to be interested in being on a computer or mobile device for a longer period of time than the average person. You have to be interested in taking a couple of minutes out of your life every once in a while to tell people what you’re doing and thinking. You have to be interested in how people use new media to communicate with each other. But you don’t necessarily understand why so many people write “FAIL!” or “WIN!” And you might feel intimidated or confused by the way people tell “in” jokes. At least I do…

It’s late at night now, and I’ve stayed up late because this is bothering me a lot. Without going into too many details, I had an experience today of being told that something I found extremely offensive was merely a reference to a source of humor for Internet geeks for over a decade now (I don’t endorse the site, but if you’re curious, it’s timecube.com). Some geeks thought it was funny to place a link to that site in the guise of a “Terms of Use” hyperlink at the bottom of every page of a website I stumbled upon the other day. For them, it was a big joke. For me, it wasn’t.

This experience made me think about the interesting mix of geeks and early adopters on Twitter at this moment in time. (Of course, there are also a huge number of “Social Media / Social Marketing / SEO Experts” on Twitter too, but don’t get me started.) It got me to thinking about who’s talking to whom. I’m currently reading The Cluetrain Manifesto in book form (it got too hard to read on my T-Mobile G1 with Google), and it talks a lot about how markets are conversations– conversations among consumers, conversations among corporations, and conversations between corporations and consumers. Basically, the book says that both consumer markets and corporations are composed of people and people need to speak with each other in a human voice. (At least that’s what I’ve gathered so far; I’m up to Chapter 3.)

So, where is the human voice on Twitter? Some would say it’s everywhere, but I find too often that the voices I “hear” on Twitter are not speaking to me. Too often, they’re trying to sell me something. Too often, the “tweets” I read have nothing to do with me. They’re either over my head or about things I don’t have enough context to understand. (This is especially a problem with @replies. I read a blog recently that said – and I paraphrase – “if you don’t understand them, either follow the people they’re replying to, unfollow them, or stop complaining.” I’ve searched for 10 minutes to find this blog, but it’s almost midnight and I can’t find it. Sorry. Leave a comment if you know the URL.)

Even the marketing strategy people say you should figure out who your market is, who you’re targeting. Are you targeting other geeks? Then continue to speak geek. But if you’re targeting regular people, then you might want to be less arcane. Take it from this early adopter, we’re smart, but not “brainy.” We’re cool, but not cliquish. And if Twitter keeps expanding, which I think it will, there aren’t going to be as many of us “early adopters” and then you’ll really need to stop speaking geek and start speaking human.

This is not a monologue; it’s a conversation. What do you think? Please leave a comment. I would like to hear your perspective on these social and marketplace issues, whether you’re a geek, an early adopter, or (to quote The Cluetrain Manifesto), “Joe Six Pack.”

I thought I’d put out some feelers at about 7 PM (#evfn started at 6), so I sent three @replies to people I know at least a little bit. None of them responded to my messages. This was when I began to imagine myself a social outcast. I thought, “They’re having too much fun to bother answering me,” or worse, “They’re having too much fun hanging out with the cool kids and they don’t want me to come and spoil their fun.” I hate it when I get like that. It could be something as simple as they don’t have their mobile devices set up to alert them to @replies right away; it could be that I should have sent them Direct Messages. In fact, when I finally did send someone a Direct Message, he responded. But by that time, it was already 7:45, the Tweetup was officially over at 8, and even though Evo said it might run long, I was afraid I would show up just as everyone was leaving and feel like the biggest loser for driving all the way out there for nothing.

By the way, I didn’t even notice the “end time” on the Upcoming event page until about 7:30. By that time, I was kicking myself, saying “I should have just driven out there at 6:45.” It’s ironic that the event description specifically says, “yes, you are invited.” Perhaps they meant that for insecure souls such as mine. Or… maybe they just meant that for the cool kids.

At any rate, I decided to stay home and watch The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 with my husband and our two dogs (the dogs don’t watch much, but they sure do cuddle). In the movie, the character played by America Ferrera of Ugly Betty fame says to an erstwhile friend, “You reminded me that no one can diminish you but yourself, so thank you.” This is a lesson I’ve learned before, but oh do I have to learn it again and again! It seems old wounds are hard to heal.

So, let’s look on the bright side: someone did respond to me when I sent him a Direct Message, so apparently that’s a better way to get someone’s attention on Twitter. Check! The whole oh-my-god-i’m-a-social-pariah thing was probably all in my head. Check! I shall let no one diminish me, especially myself. Check! And, last but not least, there’s another #evfn next week! This time, I’ll just go and get there when it starts and skip all the drama. Whew!

For starters, I was disappointed to find that hardly anyone I know or care about following is actually on Twitter at this time. This experience was in sharp contrast to my entrée into the Facebook world, which was like showing up at a party where you expect to see the one person who invited you and instead you end up seeing almost everyone you’ve ever known. The lack of friends I know on Twitter was the first disappointment. Then there’s the fact that some of my friends who have Twitter accounts don’t even check them regularly enough to have update them or reciprocate my follow by following me.

Then there are the people on Twitter that I did know and have enjoyed “socializing” with on Flickr. It was like a bubbly drink going flat. It’s fun to look at people’s photos on Flickr, comment on them, and have them comment on mine. There’s a lot of mutual admiration and wittiness that goes on in Flickr comments. But now, on Twitter, suddenly I’m hearing about their every cappuccino and reading @replies like, “@janedoe I know, right?” and “@simone Mais oui!” These tweets mean absolutely nothing to me and are of no entertainment value whatsoever.

Then there’s the redundancy of the Twitter home page. It simply lists the most recent tweets (140 character updates sent from mobile phones or Internet devices either mobile or stationary) posted by people you follow in chronological order. This means that if some little bird you know (I won’t name names) is chirping like a bird in heat about every little thing — mostly @replies that make no sense to anyone but the @recipient — then what you get is a Twitter homepage full of a slew of meaningless tweets from one very chirpy friend. Now, does that mean there’s anything wrong with the way your friend is using Twitter? Well, yes and no. Yes, because I think it would make much more sense if they limited these private replies to “direct messages” (Twitter’s form of private 1:1 messages from one Twitter user to another). I mean why bore everyone on Twitter with short answers to questions they haven’t heard? “@barbie I’m like, so totally sure!” But no, it’s not all their fault; it’s also the fault of the Twitter UI. I mean, imagine if you logged onto Flickr and it was only a slew of images posted by all of your contacts in chronological order? I know with some people’s photostreams (you know the ones who upload every image they shoot, even if they all look the same?), my Flickr experience would be awful if that’s what I saw when I logged in. Why doesn’t Twitter do a little bit more to help its members organize their Twitter experience? It would be nice if, for example, your Twitter homepage could be configured to show only the most recent tweet from each of your contacts, allowing you to click on a control to view more if you’re interested.

I have some other ideas that I think would make Twitter more useful. Allow users to rate tweets either “meaningful” or “meaningless”, “helpful” or “not helpful”, or “interesting” or “not interesting.” Even a simple thumbs up / thumbs down would be an improvement. Other sites, such as YouTube, allow you to rate user comments with thumbs up or thumbs down (and God knows with all the immature “haters” on YouTube this is a good thing). Twitter does currently allow you to “favorite” particular tweets for yourself, but those favorites are not, to my knowledge, available to anyone else for their information or enjoyment. (Compare this to Flickr, in which favorites surfing can be a joyous thrill that both entertains and tells you a lot about the person whose favorites you’re following.)

There’s something else about Twitter that really bugs me. No, let me rephrase that; it makes me sick. It’s this whole “social marketing” thing that has everyone on Twitter trying to sell something. You’ve got your “social media experts” trying to sell their consulting services and be your guide through the maze of all this newfangled “Web 2.0″ stuff. They want to help you sell your “brand.” And you know what that is? You! Yeah! You, Incorporated. You’re supposed to be a brand, now. That’s how you’re supposed to define yourself to the world and make money. And how do these people make money? Supposedly by telling you how to make money. But what do they do all day? From what I’ve seen, I get the feeling that what they do all day is sit and tweet on Twitter. Texting addicts now have a shiny new brand: social media gurus. And it’s not just the “experts” that use Twitter to sell things. It’s people promoting their websites, people promoting their businesses, people promoting their services, etc. And I have to admit: I’ve used Twitter to promote my uploads to Flickr and my latest blog posts. But most of that is stuff I give free to the world. If anything, I’ve used Twitter to “sell” the current show I’m in, Phoenix Opera‘s production of Aïda, and try to get people to support the local arts and have an amazing entertainment experience in the meantime. The sad thing is, though, that as much as I would hope Twitter would sell the opera, only one person I know on Twitter bought a ticket, and no one even came to the two rehearsals I invited the world to. (But then, they didn’t come from Flickr or Facebook either, so maybe that’s just the limited appeal of opera for you.)

But Twitter is not all bad! Far from it. There are a few people I follow who tweet a few times a day, and their tweets are meaningful to me. One of them is Twitter CEO Evan (ev on Twitter) and another is Zappos.com CEO Tony (zappos on Twitter). They each tweet a few times a day, and their tweets are informative and sometimes entertaining. I would like to see more tweeps (that’s what Twitter members call each other) take after them. On the extreme of this brevity, though, are people like Stephen Colbert (StephenColbert on Twitter) who post only one meticulously crafted tweet per day– tweets they probably spend all day honing or hire someone else to write for them. These tweets may be witty, but they do not offer a genuine interview of personality or daily life. To me, these tweets are too “safe” and are probably just a careful “branding” of one’s persona rather than an authentic sharing of one’s thoughts and actions. (I now shield myself from the wrath of the Almighty Colbert.)

It would be refreshing to meet some tweeps who are neither trying to brand themselves nor chatting up a storm like a teenage girl (no ageism nor sexism intended, but then, I refuse to be politically correct, so there you have it). What I am looking for in people whose updates I’d like to follow are:

• Friends I already know and care about
• Strangers with like thoughts, feelings, and activities
• Colleagues in my professions / hobbies (interpreting, photography, performing arts, writing, etc.) who share war stories and laughs with each other.
• People who simply give good “interview” without TMI

As for the other tweeps? I block the ones who “follow” me but whose bios are nothing more than advertisements for their websites which, in turn, are advertisements for their products or services. And the too-chatty tweeters? I just can’t bear to follow them at this point; sorry. It’s not you; it’s me. Well… maybe it is you.

So, do I have any hope for Twitter? I think so. Personally, and perhaps selfishly, I like to use my Twitter account to “microblog” (I love that word) about current events in real time. I have my Twitter account configured to place an HTML badge on the sidebar of my blog (I love the Flash badge, but I want my blog to be readable on mobile devices like my T-Mobile G1 with Google, so… no Flash for me). And I use the WordPress Twitter Tools plugin to send an update to Twitter when I publish a new blog post. I use Twitter as an experiment in brief, 140-character copywriting. As a writer who earned a bachelor’s degree in English with a concentration in Communications / Media Study, “tweeting” my thoughts and activities is a marvelous exercise in both writing and embracing new communications media. I use Twitter to let off steam. I use Twitter to be funny (if only to make myself laugh when I could cry). And I really do try to use Twitter to reach out to people, ask questions, give answers, and make friends. Sadly, though, I found that too many times, my questions went unanswered. And I fear I’ve made a few enemies with my criticisms of Twitter and the way people tweet, but who else is going to say these things? They need to be said.

What good is a connected world when it becomes so incestuous that you’re afraid to criticize it for fear of hurting people’s feelings? Critical thinking is one of the bulwarks of a functional society, as is social criticism. I was born and raised a New Yorker, and I don’t mean to use that as a copout for being rude, but I resist being some fake chipper person who pretends to like you and then stabs you in the back. If I have a problem with you, you’re gonna hear it from me. That’s what I like about New Yorkers– you know where you stand with them.

Lastly, I’m concerned about how much of a “time suck” Twitter can be, in the words of a tweep I know from Flickr. It has, in fact, made it harder for me to keep up with my Flickr contacts in terms of viewing, faving, and commenting on their photos. And it’s even taken some time away from my marriage; in fact, tonight, the one night I have off from a week full of rehearsals, I’m spending an hour or two typing this blog post instead of spending more time with my husband. I feel a bit bad about this, but I do need me time to write, and I haven’t had any until now, so I’m using my me time to write how I feel about things rather than just sit on the sofa with the hubby and watch TV. But maybe that’s TMI. We must all find balance in our lives whatever it is we take on as hobbies or professions. Tonight, I chose to be a blogger rather than a television audience. That’s not so bad. Now I’d better go and show my real friends (life partner and two dogs) how much I really love them. Good night and happy communicating!

P.S. The next morning: I should probably add that, if after reading all this, you would like to follow me on Twitter, my name there is — surprise! — danielgreene. And my Flickr name is also danielgreene.

P.P.S. Okay, I’m still learning the fine art of blogging. I am really hungry for answers, so let me ask the question. How do you make reading tweets work for you? How do you follow hundreds or thousands of people? Do you received text message updates? Do you browse Twitter Mobile, Twitter, the standard website, or some other app or mashup? I really want to know what makes Twitter work for you. Please comment below and tell me.