I am a Twitter fanatic and it doesn’t mean that I use it 8 hours a day. I am constantly on Twitter. The way I live my life enables me to be on Twitter pretty much 24/7. This means some people sometimes wonder if I use a bot or Hootsuite or any other auto tweet software. Well, I’d like to officially poke a hole in that assumption. I am the one tweeting and I am doing it always. It has always felt kind of like cheating when I think about automating my tweets. But don’t get me wrong. I, like everyone else, have of course glanced at the possibility to set up some auto tweets but so far I have kept myself from it for the simple reason that I want to be able to see if someone says something about the stuff I tweet or if anyone sends me any questions.
When Hootsuite hit the Internet everyone was pretty much against it. People thought “OMG, here comes the spam!” But, as a matter of fact it didn’t. Not to the extent that one could imagine it being used for. Twitter has been way better than for example Myspace to sift through spam accounts and deactivating them. But, the world isn’t perfect and the spammers always find new ways to get their message out there.
With time people started to find the real use of this new and improved way of making your day more efficient and enabling you to get a couple of hours of sleep while still entertaining your followers with the great content that they have come to love. As a matter of fact I see more and more people using it and if I can be frank with you it sometimes dull my day out. Not because of the fact that they are using it, no. It’s boring cause I don’t get to speak with the people that I always enjoy conversing with on Twitter. I mean, me being one of the few people that actually stays up 24 hours a day sometimes becomes quite lonely and boring. But, having 29.000 great followers certainly has its perks. At least someone should always be online right?
What I have come to ask myself is if we’re getting to lazy now to actually tweet ourselves. Are we becoming bots and what will this lead to in the end? Is it a Hootsuite generation we’re seeing invading Twitter?
I am hoping we will still keep valuing the personal connection and won’t become a mechanized Twitter syndrome where we have one software tweet stuff while we also Twitter in person. I like reading those added “Star Tags” where people share their view of the link they tweet or retweet. It gives great value and I sometimes think that maybe Twitter should have paid more attention to this whole phenomena instead of changing the RT function which is as developed and perfected as it could be. Why not add some flare and easy formatting for “Star Tag” comments instead?
Are we seeing a second revolution in how we use Twitter? Is this how we want Twitter to evolve? Hmm, I foresee an interesting time ahead of us…
