Library Twitterati

We've almost hit the end of Thursday in the 23 Things week of Twitter. Our @Uos23 Twitter account has 34 followers at the time of writing (only two of whom are spam), and we've had some good discussion over the past few days.

It's been rather more hard work than I'd expected or intended - and I have to admit that after putting in a lot of effort in the first three days, today I was feeling a bit flat. That said, I was hoping that by now people would be finding their own feet - and I tried to encourage people to retweet posts from other people that they were following outside of the 23 Things participants.

That was important, I felt - because to get a proper flavour of Twitter you really need to get involved in conversations, and you need to follow people who tweet (at least in part) on topics you're interested in. I totally appreciate that that is very hard for people to do if this week is their first ever experience of Twitter. After all, I well remember my first exploratory steps into Twitter, and at first I didn't go much on it either.

But some time later I came back to it - and eventually I kind of got the hang of it, and now I check it a lot, and tweet a fair bit too. Nothing staggeringly important - yes, I'm one of the many who mostly talk rubbish. Or football (and I'm aware that some will consider those to be one and the same!).

I do follow a few serious accounts - but the problem I have (and I do think that this is true for many people who use Twitter, or who are put off from using it) is that it's so incredibly easy to be overwhelmed by tweets.

I like Ben Goldacre, and a few other sciencey/evidence based mediciney accounts - but my timeline very quickly gets inundated with messages. Some of which are very interesting, some of which are not. And it's very hard to sort out one from the other. And go away from Twitter for a day or two and you have no hope at all of catching up on everything you've missed.

So to sum up: I use Twitter; I like Twitter; It can be really useful to find information that you wouldn't find elsewhere; But I do also accept that it takes time to get used to; And I accept that it's far from perfect.

I hope everyone has found this Twitter thing interesting and at least vaguely useful - even if it's just to the point that you know what Twitter actually is and how it works now.

And maybe, just maybe one of our participants might continue using Twitter beyond 5pm on Friday...