Of Motivations and Sourness on Twitter

Such was the suggestion after my post, Demise of Reader, Rebirth of Twitter, where I suggest that Twitter is an already used RSS reader, meaning you don’t have to test a new service or otherwise find a replacement.

I don’t know that I’d say I’m sour on Twitter, but let’s tackle the first part: motivations for Twitter.

My use of Twitter was an accident, born, like many previous accidents, out of curiosity. I was sitting in my intellectual property law class, reading through some work emails when I overheard a conversation from two classmates. They were talking about this thing called Twitter with a mix of fascinating and frustration. How could anyone write anything in 140 characters or less? What was the point? Intrigued, I signed up with a handle I had used when I wanted to remain anonymous: econwriter5.

That day was the start of presentations. And one presentation had a classmate literally sit at the front of the room and read from the slide deck, including the entire First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments, along with large sections of arguments. That prompted a tweet: Legal arguments should be like Twitter: make your point in 140 characters and move on. And thus was born @econwriter5 in the Twittersphere.

From that, it was really just curiosity. I had time on my hands since I had been laid off, and though I had some promising prospects, when the bottom fell out of the economy, the prospects vanished into the void. Twitter became an escape, a way to randomly learn new things and engage with people of different view points and backgrounds I may not otherwise meet or consider. I had a very liberal follow policy, and a very liberal engagement policy. I still do: Equal Opportunity Retweeter. I retweet anything I find interesting. And people starting sharing more information with me, and job leads.. I got my first two #freelance gigs from Twitter, and over time, it became my digital address book. I know people by Twitter handles more than names, faces or email addresses.

I’ve met some really awesome people through Twitter. I’ve connected some awesome people with others through Twitter as well. And they are not all legal professionals. I just happened to be in the legal sphere when I joined Twitter, and tweeted from a legal conference. My motivation was not to cultivate a vast network of lawyers, legal marketers and other legal professionals. It just happened that way. And because it happened that way, I’ve ended up where I am now, working for a legal software-as-a-service startup in Vancouver.

For anyone who pays the slightest attention to my Twitter feed, I lost interest in Twitter at the beginning of the year. There was an incident recently that just rubbed me the wrong way, and gave me pause to reconsider my use of Twitter. That reconsideration has been a process, and I’ve come to some realizations.

Call it social media burnout, if you must. Given the amount of time I have devoted to Twitter, both personally and professionally, such burnout is expected, and in that context, surprising it didn’t happen sooner. But to call it social media burnout is a cop out. The issue runs deeper for me.

Twitter is like email: used. Mainstream. It is just part of my every day routine. Being part of the every day routine makes Twitter the perfect replacement for Google Reader.

The real conversations, the interesting interactions and the new learning, for me, is taking place on Google+.