Back to Blogging. Continuing to Tweet.

I have been experimenting with Twitter and other social networking tools for some time now. And I have not been a frequent blogger for many months. In fact, Twitter serves as a “micro-blogging” tool, so I suppose I have been blogging… just nothing more than 140 characters at a time. Yet some thoughts require more than this, so here I am again.

With Facebook and MySpace and Plaxo and other social networking tools linked to my Twitter feeds, true “one stop” micro-blogging makes an update from my cell phone available moments later. At first I had a hard time getting my head around why one “tweets”. To those who feel the same I have one suggestion: use Twitter for one month and commit to tweet updates at least once a day. You’ll then be able to best decide for yourself if tweeting is for you or not. I am a convert.

To those wanting to know more about the experience, I recommend Michael Hyatt’s guide to Twitter. Michael is CEO of Thomas Nelson. He is also an active blogger.

When Michael started Twittering he highlighted four reasons to do so:

1. It allows family, friends, and others to follow your activity throughout the day and keep up with your life. You can even get these updates via your cell phone, as a text message. It's kind of like the Truman Show meets instant messaging.

2. It allows you to meet new friends, who tend to be on the cutting edge of technology. I am following several people that I would have never met otherwise. These are relationships-or potential relationships-that may prove very fruitful for the future. We'll see.

3. It allows me to experience first-hand a new technology that almost 1 million people are using. It may be a complete waste of time but it is free and the investment of time is miniscule.

4. It allows me to think consciously about my life. What am I doing now? What kind of story is my life telling? Is this really what I want to be doing? Could I-should I-be choosing something different?

Reason #1 has helped me keep in close touch with our children and with Susan when I travel and even throughout the day. I feel connected with our children even though we are often thousands of miles apart. This is especially true of late as Susan and I became empty nesters this past month. Jenn and Amanda are living in the Seattle area now. Sarah is studying in Australia. And Jonathon is at MTSU.

Reason #1 has also applied to our extended family and friends. I have been able to catch up and keep up with family and friends better than ever before. It’s a blast seeing photos more rapidly and more often than ever before as families and friends share their life journey.

And I personally like reason #4. It is a worthwhile question to ask… “What story is my life telling?”

If you want to "follow me," you can do do my joining Twitter.com and officially following me. You can follow Michael on Twitter here. It’s time to micro-blog!

Comments

[Kenneth Reitz]

I agree with your self-inflection point. If only people used Twitter for more... relevant things than "I'm cold" :P

http://kennethreitz.com