Spanking on Twitter

There’s been lots and lots of conversation about twitter lately, its relative merits, when to follow, when to unfollow (invariably far more painful) and whether or not the whole thing is a waste of time. Well, allow me to weigh in here with my own $0.02

I *love* Twitter.

I’ve met so many amazing people and spanking bloggers through Twitter that I would otherwise never have known existed, and even if I had known they existed, I certainly never would have had the chance to swap witty ripostes with them in real time. I would never have connected with them in the way I am able to connect with them, on a day to day basis. Twitter keeps me in touch not just with spanko folk, but with friends – because that’s what happens when you do twitter right, you make friends with people with similar interests and outlooks on life.

I’ve seen and partaken in some seriously funny and sometimes insightful conversations on Twitter, but it’s not just all fun and games. Twitter has been there in the hard times too. Twitter gets a lot of stick for being vapid and generally useless, but in the middle of June when not one, but two fairly large earthquakes hit Christchurch, the latest in a long line of natural disasters that have threatened to shake and rattle and bowl our houses down, I was on Twitter. I was on Twitter when they hit and then I was on Twitter when I was outside the house, sitting on the ground, quivering as the ground rolled sickeningly beneath my ass. Twitter stayed up when the phone networks went down and in that moment, home alone with liquefaction pouring out of the ground a few hundred yards away and the whole house rumbling with the ongoing tremors, Twitter made me feel a hell of a lot less alone.

Of course there’s such a thing as too much Twitter, and breaks are necessary and natural. It does have it’s negatives, which have been dwelt on at length in other venues, but for me, Twitter is my primary social networking tool. I don’t even have comments on my blog anymore, mostly because I loathe dealing with spam and its easier not to have them on, but also because I can always be reached (sooner or later) on the Twitters, and if you don’t want to Twitter, well, there’s always email :)