My 1,000th Tweet

This is ridiculous. I'm writing a blog post on Blogger about my 1,000th Tweet which will then appear on Facebook. I'm actually writing this specifically to link from that 1,000th Tweet. My metareality just imploded. And in any case, I'm starving and I have scrumptious Pad Thai being made and delivered to me, so I might as well write this instead of looking out the door every two minutes to see if my lunch has arrived.

Anyway, you'll hear people -- mostly Caucasian people with way too much time on their hands and not enough desire to think about important stuff -- talk about why Twitter is better than this, or Facebook is better than that, or why it's all terrible but they continue to use it anyway, and so on. I really don't care about any of those things. As a social person and especially as a performing musician and recording singer-songwriter, all social network services are important to me.

A lot of people won't be very impressed with 1,000 entries on Twitter, especially considering that they span the last three years. It's not that I'm incapable of prolific Tweeting. There are simple reason why I don't Tweet every few seconds.

1. My job has me running the social networks of several large companies, and making entries in their Twitter and Facebook accounts is one of the things I do for work. Hence, I'm not always in the mood to do my own social networking after taking care of all of their needs.

2. I prefer to write things that actually matter to me in some way. It's not that "my Tweets are important, dammit!". It's that unless I'm feeling it, I ain't Tweeting it. That may mean I Tweet about what I had for lunch, but it may also mean that I don't Tweet my reaction to every news story.

3. While I'm a low-key public figure in my small-time rock star way, I'm more of a private person than you may realize. That's why you don't see many Tweets about my child, or about my love life, or about my finances, and so on.

So while I may only post an average of one Tweet per day, I do enjoy the aspect of connecting to the people who choose to follow me, and not filling their timeline with notices of every time I use the bathroom, stub my toe, or put on my sneakers (though I reserve the right to do so whenever I feel like it). However, I tend to enjoy other people who Tweet a lot. There is a short list of people on my timeline who are incredibly funny with an ability to deliver undeniably hilarious messages in under 140 characters. Brevity was never my strong suit.

I've also learned a lot about people on Twitter. There's something about the format that encourages folks to get to the point in a way that they can't do in longer form writing. A lot of what I've learned is about the misconceptions of what each gender thinks about the other... I can't tell you how many "this is what men like" Tweets that can't be further from the truth. I've also seen the phenomenon where all people want is good news, and the moment that you bring up something contrary to their message... well, it's sure easy to just block out that dark and rainy cloud and keep pretending that everything in the world is going your way and everyone you know agrees with everything you say, right?

Despite those things, I find that I now turn to Twitter whenever I get the inkling of an important event happening in the world. By the time the first news media services start covering it, I already know many details, and often those details are from people actually experiencing the event (and not some reporter's interpretation of it). So, hats off to Twitter, and those who make it an enjoyable experience for me.

Now to finish my Pad Thai (which is freaking delicious, in case you didn't know). And thanks for the follows, my Tweeple.