If Everyone Tweeted Off a Bridge, Would I?

Ah yes, the age-old “but all the kids are doing it!” argument that kids have used to justify foolish undertakings since time immemorial.

(I believe my favorite foolish undertaking was at age 12, as I pulled a balancing act across a not-wide sewer pipe that ran 20-feet in the air across a shallow, rocky stream at a construction site near my house. Although, come to think of it, I never had to use that excuse on my mom, because she never found out. Hi, Mom!)

Maybe that’s not the best example, because in this case, what all the “cool kids” are doing is actually relevant to my career, interesting to me personally, and has the added bonus of being pretty fun. I’m talking, of course, about the various social media platforms that have sprung to life recently (this year especially), infiltrating public relations and permanently changing the face of media and communications.

So why am I so annoyed that I finally broke down and set up my Twitter account?

I avoided microblogging like the plague, and Twitter in particular, ever since it became (as BL Ochman put it) “queen of the prom” at South by Southwest this year. At that time, I was shirking anything that didn’t appear to add any immediate value to my work day. And since, also at that time, Twitter was getting a lot of “so what?” reviews from people who didn’t really need to hear about anyone’s breakfast meat of choice, I decided it wasn’t for me.

Since then I’ve joined and enjoyed Pownce, yet it hasn’t taken off the way Twitter did, with many complaining about its lack of mobility. The more complaints about Pownce I heard, the more I let the “You need to just get on Twitter” voice in the back of my head eat away at me, until finally, during a mid-morning lull today, I relented.

I’m excited to get started, yet I feel like I caved, like I represented some sort of one-woman resistance to the latest fad, and my barricades have been infiltrated by the rebels. (But all the cool kids are doing it!) Maybe my problem is that I know I will thoroughly enjoy Twitter, I’ll end up as hooked on it as I am on Facebook. I am obsessed enough as it is when I’m on my laptop, now I’ll be checking my phone every three seconds as well.

That is, if I can actually get my profile set up properly!

So far, I have been unable to “follow” anyone, for reasons passing my understanding. I keep reading the FAQ, trying to figure it out, using Chip’s page as my guinea pig (which hopefully is not resulting in a million emails to him, informing him of my seemingly desperate desire to follow his updates!).

I also can’t even begin to comprehend why the site does not appear to have a “search” box for finding people I may want to follow. If I can find anyone, I very well can’t follow them.

The result? My very first Twitter update, which will reach no one, as I yet to have any friends to Tweet at: “Hating Twitter already.”

UPDATE: Well, things are going much smoother now. But I still think the lack of a search box is fairly ridiculous.