Thursday, September 13, 2012

How to Keep a Conversation Going on Twitter

The masterminds behind Twitter must have been people who didn't like to listen very much. In case you're not familiar with the concept of Twitter, the whole idea is that people can instantly spew the thoughts out to the general public anytime and anywhere - provided that they keep their thoughts to a maximum length of 160 characters.

Needless to say, if you're trying to hold any sort of intelligent conversation on Twitter, it becomes increasingly difficult. Let's be honest; if you can help it, 'u'd rather not hav 2 typ like dis' to save character space. Unfortunately, it's unavoidable at times in order to fit in the information you want to convey, along with any links you may want to go with it.

But my question is this: Is it actually even possible to keep a truly interesting conversation going on Twitter?

Let's go back a ways to pen-pals (boy am I getting old...). You would write them, and wait days or weeks before you heard a reply. But wasn't it true that part of the fun in the anticipation of the response? In some ways it kept the conversation going, because there were always new things that were happening in between the letters, and therefore there was even more to talk about each time you had the opportunity to reply to a letter. Fast forward to the present period, and here we are with instantaneous Twitter, where you may only have to wait a few minutes before someone replies to your "tweet". Now, I don't know about you, dear reader, but in my life, not very much can happen in one minute. And therefore the topics presented in this "tweet-versation" must be concise in explanation, yet verbose in thought. And that, my friend, is the challenge.

Over the next few days, weeks, months I've set myself a personal goal to reach out to those people on Twitter that are following me, and I, them. Of the 960 or so who are following me, I have had the pleasure of just a few conversations and those only lasted a few "tweets". I think it's high time that these people find out who I really am, and I who they are. And thus the challenge begins.

I will post back some findings on this experiment at a later date!

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