Now I’m a Twit as well

I am now a Twit. Or I think maybe that should be I now Tweet.

Man, I can’t really get used to all this new fangled technology talk – anyway I’ve joined Twitter.

To be honest, I’ve been aware of Twitter for quite some time now, and yet because I had somehow found myself sucked into the whole Facebook thingy that has swept across the country, I had convinced myself that I didn’t need to be on Twitter too.

I mean, come on now, it’s just some kinda big teletext machine with people putting all kinds of random stuff up that is mostly of no interest whatsoever.

And then I went to a talk by Ireland’s top blogger Damien Mulley last week and suddenly found myself thinking on my way back in the car – umm, random nonsense eh, that Twitter thing might right up my street after all.

But there was a snag.

I have, in the past, been known to ramble a while before finally getting to my point – all in the best interests of building up suspense and getting in as many bad puns as I possibly could of course.

But Twitter will stand for no such messing about and beatin’ about the bush.

No. Twitter gives you 140 characters and if you can’t get your nonsense, umm, I mean message, across in that, well tough.

And yet, I joined.

I sat at the computer for half an hour or twenty minutes or whatever and got the whole shebang set up.

And then I realised I knew nobody on Twitter. I mean when I joined Facebook somebody suggested I join, so it was a bit like going to a wake or a party or something. As long as you knew you weren’t going on your own, it was never so bad.

But here I was, without even a Mass Card tucked under me arm or anything, stepping bravely into the whole Twitter world thingy and not knowin a bein’ in the place.

And after that I had to think on something to write. I mean anything, something cool and funny and interesting. Something that would say to these people on Twitter already that I was here now and they all should be delighted.

But all I could think on was - Now to embrace this whole Twitter thingmebob.

It was probably the Twitter equivalent of the old ‘do you come here often’ chat-up line, and I desperately sought a delete, undo, take back button and couldn’t find one.

But hey, at least sitting behind the screen you don’t see the thousands cringing at your stupidity, so as soon as you can think of something else stupid to say, you can go ahead and post it right up there.

So long as you can manage to keep it all within that magic number of 140 characters that is.

And to be honest, I think that might be a bit of a problem for me.

You see, I never really mastered the art of short text messages because I like to use real words when I write.

And because I do, I send most of my texts from my computer where, if I have to use a madey up word, I like it to be one I madey uppy myself, not some kinda weird combination of letters and numbers.

You know the stuff – gr8 and B4 and all the stuff you see in text messages.

And with all that in mind, I’m really not sure how this whole Twitter thing will work out for me.

And yet, at least it did manage to kick start me back on the blogging trail again, thanks to a perfect Twitter post from one of my girls who watched me struggle with the whole character count thing.

“Well, if you can't get your nonsense to fit into 140 characters it's about time you re-started your stoopid blog again. You big Twit!”

Umm, you know, I think she had a point...

(After a good old break I hope to post here now once a week) - Liam