Who has time to twitter?

I was at a friend house last night, he came running up the stairs saying, “You should have just seen this on the news, a woman fell into a polar bear’s enclosure and got bitten on the bum”.

“I saw it last night.” I replied.

“Twitter?” He asked.

I didn’t have to answer.

He stomped off to watch the rest of the news moaning and groaning that he was going to have to get the hang of this twitter thing.

Almost everyone I meet is the same, they want to get on twitter because of the immediacy, but can’t find the time to play with it and find out how it works for them.

Or they think it’s a waste of time.

They like sitting down in a comfy chair watching the news all neatly packaged for them, and they like discussing the same stories with their friends who buy the package deal too.

It’s a shame, because like everything techie, spend a few hours (or days) working it out and you’ll wonder how you ever managed to live without it.

Twitter is like a worldwide networking event, a place you can go 24 hours a day and meet interesting people. However, like every networking event you have ever been to, you will be greeted by an onslaught of life coaches and people trying to sell you something.

And they will follow you!

But if you manage to give them the slip (I find following them when they follow you, then deleting them later means they never really know you’ve gone), leaves you a room full of the most interesting people on the planet.

Now all you have to do is find the interesting morsel of information to start a conversation with them.

My best friend is one of the most talented small talkers I know, she can work a room and talk to anyone, she’s the life and soul of the party and thinks all this social media is making us introspective and will be the death of social interaction.

Now I’m the sort of person who hates small talk and niceties, when I go to a party I usually find someone interesting and sit in a dark corner talking about anything from what it’s like to be the daughter of an artificial inseminator to the crisis in the Middle East.

Twitter isn’t the end of social interaction, it’s an evolution. It’s no longer about how good you look, who you know ,what you do or what you read in the paper that brings you to a conversation, it’s what you bring to the conversation that brings you to the conversation.

Ironic isn’t it? Small talk is being beaten in 140 characters or less, but as that famous French writer (who no one can remember) said: “Sorry to send you such a long letter, I didn’t have time to write you a short one”

Oh and just so you know, the night of the polar bear incident I’d watched my own news; Madonna’s adoption of Mercy, her and Guy cuddling up at a Kabbalah event, Amazon’s homophobic search engine and the Theory of Everything.

There are parallel dimensions and string theory all over twitter, I suspect I will never have a friend run upstairs and tell me that an eleventh dimension had been discovered on channel 7 news.

Or what’s really going on in the universe:

space hand