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How was life without Twitter

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.Image by ( Krikit ) via Flickr

About a week ago I suddenly stopped using Twitter. I remove the Twitterberry app from my Blackberry, and disabled the web version. So there was no more Twitter. During this time I continued with my normal life and started gathering notes on differences.

Three biggest observations:

  1. I should Twitter this effect. I realized that I became more self-conscious. While things are happening to me in a course of day, I see events that are “important enough” to warrant a Tweet. I also tried to formulate perfect 140-chars limited wording in my head. The fact that I couldn’t get my twitter hit, always left me a bit down.
  2. Nobody missed anything important. Not really a discovery, but I think that nobody really missed things that I broadcast out. There were a few requests for information/parties/etc. but somehow they everyone managed to find me through the usual channels: email/IRC/etc.
  3. I didn’t miss big things. While I can’t really know this without going back and reading the whole week of Tweets, I got all the information I needed through RSS feeds or personal/electronic interaction with people.

While nothing bad happened, I did notice that I was less distracted. I’m not sure if this is connected directly to not using Twitter, but not having something to do while being bored for 3 minutes at lunch/meeting/etc. did help me focus better.

I did probably miss a lot of impromptu opportunities for meetings, coffee and similar that people throw out into Twitter, and hope that someone replies. As a consequence of this I spent a few more evenings at home, hacking and working on fun things (like blogging).

Going back

I do want to go back into using Twitter. I will probably follow less people, and self-control myself on mobile device but most importantly, I just need to reserve myself more personal time and cut down on all the social hanging out (it’s not that I don’t enjoy it, but maybe there is an upper limit).

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— everyday life

2 responses to “How was life without Twitter”

  1. Meh, I never liked the idea of Twitter anyway — it’s like mass-SMSing.

    Sure, there’s some benefits. But when all’s said and done — unless you’re big time into haiku — both is just a bother as the message you get across (or at least desperately try to) is too obscured by the bizare size limitation.

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