I'm a relative newby to the twitterverse.  The majority of people I tweet with have been tweeting for quite some time.  I did try over a year ago to use Twitter but could not for the life of me see what use it was.  For goodness sake, who really cares whether I am working hard, going out or cooking spag bol for dinner?  No one I'm guessing, because no one Tweeted with me during that 1 month period.  I felt like a social outcast.  I felt like I was having 140 character conversations with myself.  I felt like I was one of those kids in the playground that no one wanted to be friends with.   There was a lot of chatter going on around me, but none with me.   Needless to say I snuck away, unnoticed by anyone in the twitterverse, to Facebook where I had real friends.

Fast Forward 1 year.  I met Mel Kettle (@melkettle) at a meeting where she was giving a brief of the presentation she was going to give on Social Networking.  Mel is a big Twitter fan.  After listening to her I thought I might go home and add her as a friend on Twitter and see what happens.  

The rest is history ... I've been twittering regularly for about a month now and my follower list has gone from 20 to 334.   The missing link from my prior experience was the word "connect".  Twitter is all about connecting.  Instant connection.  140 character snippets of you.  I finally got it.  Now I love it and continually preach about it to anyone who will listen.   Someone, I think @problogger, said "Twitter is about now and Facebook is about the past" - I think he's right.

Two nights ago were were having a wonderful afternoon/night drinks/dinner with fabulous friends. For this blog I am going to call my friends Lovely 1 and Lovely 2 (to protect their privacy). Lovely 1 is a young mum who works full time and has twin 4 year old boys and she started telling us how overwhelmed she feels by Facebook.

She said that every few months she has to shut down her Facebook account because the obligations it puts on her is overwhelming. I have to admit that I didn't really understand. Neither did Lovely 2. Lovely 1 told us she feels guilty that she is a bad friend if she doesn't reply to everyone that makes a comment on her Facebook feed and also if she doesn't visit her friends Facebook pages and comment on their photos/status updates etc. I have to admit that Lovely 2 and I looked at each other a bit confused because we don't feel this same pressure.