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So you want to follow me on Twitter

Last updated 17 March 2013

Congratulations! You have a Twitter account, and somehow you have stumbled across my account. That follow button may look awfully tempting after you read over the past few pearls of wisdom that I’ve dropped onto the Internet. Before you click that follow button and regret it a few weeks later when I’m linkspamming or retweet-spamming or talking about abstract algebra or open source software or silly hashtags, it’s best that you know what you’re getting yourself into. A page of tweets (or two, or three) rarely does anyone much good. So what are you getting yourself into, anyway?

Here’s my Twtrland profile so you can get a good idea for yourself. It categorizes me as a power user and, for some reason, under the food category. Twtrland is for the eating of sushi. How unfortunate.

First, I direct tweets at people a lot. This means that while it looks like I tweet a lot, you may not see a lot of them for awhile–unless, of course, we happen to follow several of the same people. If you know me through NaNoWriMo, this is not impossible and in fact may be the case. I’ve jumped into several conversations with other Wrimos in my Twitter circle, and they’ve jumped into conversations that I was having because we share followers.

I tweet a lot of links. Honestly, I probably tweet more links than anything else. You’ll probably learn something interesting or want to gouge your eyes out with a spork, or at least wonder where on earth I find my material. Thankfully, I do not tweet every single link that goes into my Delicious account because if I did, at least twenty more tweets would show up on my stream outside of my own accord, and that would annoy even me. Why not? There’s already far too much feed pollution going on with everyone linking their Twitters and Facebooks and Tumblrs and blogs and what have you, and it is time to stop that nonsense. I don’t even tweet every single post I make here–just the particularly poignant ones, like possibly this one.

Some days my tweets will be more interesting than others. What determines that? It’s a complicated formula that involves how interesting my day is, what’s on my mind, my mood, my whereabouts, and the phase of the moon. There’s a similar formula that calculates how many tweets I’ll make in a given day that uses similar variables. In short: it varies a lot. I tweet a lot when I should be doing something else, and sometimes I’ll go nearly a day sans update. Some things just aren’t worth a Twitter update. No, I do not need to broadcast every single aspect of my programming progress to the world unless it’s spectacular in some way. Be grateful.

I livetweet things on occasion. Not often, but it does happen. The last time it happened was with the national spelling bee finals. The time before that was something Apple-related, not because I’m an Apple fangirl, but because I knew I’d be hearing all about it in the tech blogs I read, so I may as well get the news firsthand. In case you’re wondering, I’m not an Apple hater, but I do use Linux. That should tell you a lot. However, when I do livetweet, I try to keep it interesting. Well, except for the spelling bee. Then I just do whatever I want.

It’d be a good idea to know what I like to talk about, isn’t it? After all, my Twitter profile (at the moment) says “The Sushi from NaNoWriMo. Writer. Math nerd. Geek of many trades. wikiwrimo.org admin. I’m the Internet, not food. thisnameATgmail”. The first line is because yes, people have asked, despite using the same name at both sites. I’ll talk about anything. Between October and December, I talk about NaNoWriMo a lot. Current interests are a popular topic, and they tend toward the geeky and techy.

So for the big question: Will I follow you back? Well… probably not. Not because you’re a terrible human because I’m sure you’re wonderful. But I’ve crept up past 1300 followers (aah! who are you people? where did you find me?), and there is no reasonable way for me to keep up with every single person and still keep Twitter fun while getting work done. (I work from home. This is a serious issue.) Fun fact: I now have far more Twitter followers than Facebook friends and am completely okay with this. These days many of my new followings are folks I know in some way from outside of Twitter. I do read all my @mentions and reply to many of them, though.

Convinced yet? Scared off? Follow away.

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