A blog post about twitter (which will be tweeted)

I've been on twitter for two years. Like with Facebook, I saw it as an utterly useless waste of time. Why would I want to let anyone know what I'm eating for dinner or what movie I'm watching? More so, who would want to read about the mundane details of my life? Under that logic, Twitter was dumb.

Almost 5000 tweets later and I've changed my tune. Twitter is neat. I spend tons of time scrolling through tweets and I routinely tweet things myself, both 'useless' things and thought provoking ones. Originally, I caved and got a twitter because, as someone living in the midwest, I wanted a way to find out when bands I listened to were touring and if they were maybe stopping within 5 hours of South Dakota. If you want to scroll all the way back to the beginning of my following, you'll see this reflected. The next step of my twittering was the adding of personalities and news: Stephen Colbert, YouTube personalities Charlie McDonnel and TheFineBros, comic artist Jhonen Vasquez. Then came the brands, Bioware, Dorkly, and Team Fortress 2. During this period, I didn't tweet. I creeped. My time on Twitter was spent going through the tweets of all these famous personalities I followed.  I was one of several thousand to them.

I went to a party over the summer between my Freshman and Sophomore year of college. It was a NARP for the online website and community Destructoid, a yearly Midwestern meetup. All of the people here were ones I had only met online and never in person. This party was probably the first place I was asked "do you have a twitter?" and the event that started my participation in twitter.  Now, nearly two years later, I'm connected with so many different people through twitter. People from my hometown, people here at DSU, and people I've never met in the real world yet talk to frequently.  My news comes from my twitter. My casual conversation comes from my twitter. What I had deemed a waste of time only a few years prior is now one of the primary fonts of my information.

I've found that when something is going on, Twitter is the place to be. When the Pope announced his resigination two days ago, I found out during class from Twitter. When there's a big gaming event going on (E3, PAX) the news from those press conferences goes right up to twitter. Even when I'm at an event like that, information on what's going on and where I should be to get the most out of my experience is up to Twitter.  Past-Me was wrong; twitter is pretty neat.

What started as a way for me to simply get information has become a social medium for me to communicate with others and become a cog in that information-passing wheel. Retweets, original thoughts, casual conversations; all of these are things I've experienced over twitter. And unlike facebook, my dad isn't following me on Twitter so I've got a little more freedom on that front as well.