I like to think I was a Facebook Australia pioneer, and I'll tell you why.
The year was 2006 and I had just finished high school and been accepted into Uni, when my best friend (who was a few years older) moved to France for a year to study as part of her degree.
I attended one primary school for seven years, followed by one high school for six, so I was very comfortable with the highly structured school environment and I wasn't necessarily ready for the daunting prospect of a Uni degree.
Without my best friend easily contactable on the phone and Skype not being even mildly as reliable as it is today, I had no. Choice but to use email.
We would email back and forth and her experiences sounded incredible. The only thing that was missing was pictures. I desperately wanted to see what she was doing, but she told me the only way I could was to sign up to this site that all the Uni students in Europe were using. That site was of course Facebook. This was problematic however because although I had enrolled in my degree, I didn't yet have a Uni email address and as such could not access it. As soon as I started Uni about a month later I signed up and could finally see the pictures of her hanging out in a French dormitory. Admittedly, not that exciting, but I'd been waiting so long that I felt part of some elite club that nobody knew about.
And I kind of was. It was about 6 months until I had my second Facebook friend, and then almost immediately it escalated and I found myself studying it in my lectures and debating it in my tutorials.
While I've moaned and groaned about every layout change with everybody else, I have (in the end) embraced them and looked forward to new and exciting things. So it stands to reason that as a self proclaimed Facebook junkie I would be a fan of other social networking platforms right?
I had an MSN Space back in high school, as well as an original MySpace, a Bebo account, a Flickr profile, a Pinterest account, a linked in, a StarNow profile, a new MySpace, and every other thing you could think of. One thing I didn't have was a Twitter account.
As an impulsive subscriber, and registration junkie, you'd have thought I would have jumped on Twitter years ago. I thought about it many times, every time deciding I didn't need another social media platform to get addicted to.
I was so sure that if I started a Twitter account I would never get off and it would be detrimental to my general productivity as a person.
A few nights ago I made a rash decision at 12:30am that I needed a Twitter account. I could pretend that I had some really important reason to be in the loop, after all the papal election was trending world wide and everyone was waiting to see who the new guy would be. But I could get that info from Facebook, Google, or the old fashioned source, the news...
No, at 12:30 in the morning I decided it was vital that I join Twitter - I'm embarrassed to say - because I wanted to follow the account of the actor who plays Home and Away's newest River boy. Why? Because I'm a little bit in love with him. :-S
So join Twitter I did, and four days later I still have no idea how it works, why people use it, and why people go crazy with hash tags. To me it looks like a scrambled unformatted mess of words and colour on the screen. The biggest Internet sensation since Facebook is lost on me. I've tried tweeting about the football; I've tried tweeting about charity and St Patrick's Day; I tried tweeting about Aussie Pickers; and yes, I've also tried tweeting about my new favourite Home and Away actor @NicWestaway.
I just don't get it. It's still a mess of words and symbols to me, where people mostly retweet uninteresting things other people wrote for a whole bunch of other people to see.
In my effort to conform to what all the "cool kids" are doing I've failed miserably. It takes me back to one of those tutorials in first year Uni where I sat in the middle of a classroom with 10 students screaming: "CONFORM" over and over, while one girl whispered: "It's cool to be different." Today, I'm listening to that girl.
Who knows, maybe something will change and I'll become entranced into the world of Twitter, and the magic of crafting a beautiful comment in 140 characters or less. Maybe I'm just not following the right people.
Watch this space.
Twitter: 2/10
UPDATE 18/3:
My inability to use Twitter is obviously worse than I thought...
My account was suspended due to "Aggressive following" which can be described as:Aggressive following is defined as indiscriminately following hundreds of accounts just to garner attention. However, following a few users if their accounts seem interesting is normal and is not considered aggressive.
I'm confused... my understanding was that the point of Twitter was to follow people??? Apparently the universe thinks Twitter and me are a bad idea too!
Indeed Natalie. Twitter - legalized stalking of stars :)
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