What The Tweet?

Many moons ago I didn't understand Twitter. I couldn't fathom a reason why millions of people would feel the urge to tweet their random thoughts and mundane activities to the masses. Who would want to listen? Who would care? On my first Twitter attempt (Twitempt?) I gave up after a month. It might have been something to do with Claudia Winkleman not tweeting me back, but in general I did find it tedious (Tweedious). That was March 2010.

Scroll forward to over a year and 170 tweets later, I am obsessed. Since the end of May I have been bashing out my witticisms on my keyboard to my tweeting heart's content to my ever growing number of followers. I restarted posting my 140 characters of nonsense due to the advice of a certain sports hack I met one night who insisted it would help gander attention for my blog I had recently given a voice to. So out went all the irrelevant Twitter peeps (Tweeps) I was following, in went fashion journalists, magazines and various VITs (Very Important Tweeps) I wanted to stand up and take notice of my budding blog posts. The more I followed, the more followed me. One day the aforementioned sports journalist tweeted to his fans a link to a post and my page views went up to over the 300 mark. I started to see my URL @LRoseHill crop up in #FF selections (Follow Friday - a way to broadcast weekly suggestions of people you think others should follow). The Twitter bug had bit.

However, the best publicity I have received yet occurred yesterday. None other than Lilly Allen (@MrsLRCooper) retweeted (RT'd) something I wrote to her 3,000,000-plus followers. What had been a throw-away comment sent in reply to one of the ex-songstress' tweets became a massive talking point. My phone keeps pinging away, informing me of new comments on the subject and of the soaring number of followers I was amassing. Now, I don't personally know Lily Allen, and I shouldn't be this excited a stranger RT'd something I said...but it's LILY ALLEN! Queen of the Twitterati! It literally made my day.

Twitter is also, in it's purest state, an acceptable form of stalking. Its basic function is to allow us an incite to all the goings-on of the celebrities we idolise and love- people we would never have a chance to meet in real life. Their updates can be sent to our inboxes and our phones to make sure we are never out of the loop. The whole concept works because it feeds on our insatiable appetite for paparazzi-style invasion of the lives of the rich and famous. Only this is actually commissioned by those who readily voice their objection to privacy infringement. With one hand they push away the shutterbugs that hound them, while they feed us the information anyway with the other. They don't really win either way. Cruel irony? Or poetic justice?

is the shape embedded into many of the public's hearts for our beloved social website to curl up and remain. Well, for the time being, until  a new hotter, younger model is invented in a nanosecond's time which will replace Twitter and make us forget all about the site that was. What is the past tense of tweeting? Twatting?

Peace

x

(follow me on Twitter via @LRoseHill)