To Tweet or not to Tweet

I started a Twitter account very early on.  I remember joining the upstart website sometime in 2007-2008 because I heard a lot of celebrities were doing it and I wanted to be in the in crowd and show all my friends how cool I was.  Unfortunately it didn't work out that way.  I told all my friends about the idea behind it (it was just like Facebook, except you can only update your status) and each time I would get the same response, "Why would I want to do that when I have Facebook?".  I slowly got more and more deflated as I tweeted daily about everything I was doing, yet only having 10 followers (3 of which were my family).  Needless to say I jumped ship because there was no point to it at that time.  Facebook had all my friends and was a lot more fun to be on too.

Fast forward to 2012 where Twitter seems to be everywhere.  News anchors talk about it, TV shows have accounts, the President himself asked Americans to tweet our opinions to Congress today.  Twitter has apparently made a HUGE comeback and I wasn't a part of it.  When I started this class and we started talking about Twitter and I didn't know what to make of it because all I know about Twitter is the annoying people on Facebook who can't seem to write an update without using hashtags (hint: they don't work on Facebook).

However, once I saw the new search functionality of the hashtags and how easy it is to follow people who are interested in the same things as you, it made me take a second look at it.  No longer were there a handful of noobs on the site mixed with attention starved celebriteis.  Now when I go on, I see professionals sharing information, companies sharing deals, educators helping educators and it is really nice.  I feel like I am using a more personalized search engine and I'm not bombarded with a lot of things that I don't need or want. 

When you type "eggs" into Google, you'll get 1.5 billion hits from every website that has ever mentioned "eggs".  On Twitter, I've noticed that you don't get just raw data, you actually get information that someone else had already researched and packaged into a short little blurb that you can scroll past if you don't have time to read it.  The functionality of Twitter has dramatically increased over the past 4 years and while I am still wary about jumping completely back in, my first experience this year has been a positive one and I am looking forward to using it more.