Jason Murphy

And Now, An Update…

Nov 30, 2008 Blog General, twitter

I admit, my upkeep of Blog #1 has been minimal lately. But I haven’t really been gone. Friends and family, peers and strangers alike have been able to keep updated on the world of JM through Twitter, Facebook, and others.

Lately I’ve been infatuated with Twitter.com. It’s a simple service that the majority of the world doesn’t understand. It’s easy to be confused at first. It starts by asking “What are you up to?”, to which an obvious first response would be “I’m wondering why in the world I want to tell everyone what I’m doing all the time.” I’ll admit, the premise escaped me at first too. Twitter really sounded like a tool for ego-maniacs to revel in their self-importance with their phantom fanbase watching. I was woefully misunderstanding.

A lot of people say that twitter has evolved. While that is true, I really think it is how the users apply twitter has seen the larger evolutionary scale. The way I use twitter is so beyond its original intent that the “What are you up to?” question is completely irrelevant. To me, twitter is a way of creating and maintaining online relationships. I can “follow” influential people in my business and personal lives and start or participate in conversations at will. If I want to talk football during the Broncos game (as I’m doing now), I can simply send an update and see if other Broncos fans are out there (and ther are!).

The context of the conversations on Twitter are entirely different than what you’d be lead to believe by their homepage. For example, I was at PubCon in Las Vegas a few weeks ago and was able to get updates about one conference session via Twitter while attending another. Those updates convinced me that the session I was missing out on was better than the one I was in, so I got up, snuck out the back and jumped in the session that had more value at the moment. We were able to cordinate large group dinners and meetups, and even make arrangements to meet vendors through twitter.

So, while my blog hasn’t been updated in a while, my Twitter feed has. Creating a blog post is a lot more of a commitment than sending out a simple twitter shout (“tweet” is the proper term). Coming up, I’m commiting to updating this blog a lot more this month, even contemplating another 30 day challenge, but for the most part you can always see what the latest is by following me on twitter.

BTW – if you want to jump into the twitter world head first, my friend John has an excellent free starters guide on how to use Twitter called “How to be a Twitter Rockstar“. Sign-up for his newsletter and it is yours free (and I’ll vouch that he doesn’t spam you either).

Tags: blogging, pubcon, twitter, updates