the conspiracy of twitter

Does anyone else think we are in the middle of a vast conspiracy here? You see I am trying to be ahead of the curve on this one. Or...well...at least not too far behind it. I was years late on facebook and on blogging and on our website, so why not jump on the band wagon early with twitter? After all, it is what everyone in the cyber world seems to be talking about.

We are a small group of handicapped craftspeople in Congo. Surely there must be something to tweet about. After all, we are all about the story. Our craftspeople have amazing stories and live amazing lives. And I am sure that is half of why people buy our products (although they are cool in their own right) If all the gigantic faceless companies are using tweets to make themselves personal, surely we can tweet too!

Except that I hate tweeting. I am trying to work up the nerve to have a go at it today, but well, really? It just seems soooooo boring. I mean do you really want to know what I am doing right now? (sitting at a computer...it really is pretty much the same whether it is in Africa or in the US) Besides you can see that on facebook. I mean I like conversations. I throughly enjoy reading comments on blogs, and even on facebooks. Even when they're not to me, you find a lot of interesting conversations. And it is nice to know what your friends are talking about (as long as it isn't you!)

But tweets seem like they just fall from the sky and sit there. I don't see a lot of interaction. I mean I can see tweets where people ask questions but I don't see any answers. Surely they must be there. Am I missing something? THis is not a rhetorical question. Please talk to me! I really WANT to get the tweeting thing down.

WHat I do see is that twitter could be great if I was a big company. If people actually talked about me, I could search for my name and that would be a great way to follow what my customers were thinking.

Which leads me to my conspiracy theory. About a month ago I watched CNN. We do not have a television nor a satellite connection, so we do not ever watch CNN. Not sure that I would if I could. Except that when you have no television news for a year, and you go on vacation to a hotel where they have CNN you kind of get sucked in. For about half an hour. Until they start replaying the same blurb that you just watched. But while I was sucked in, they had a feature on twitter, and how it is changing the face of reporting etc... And then I went home and started reading up on twitter, and there are so many websites and blogs talking about how you should add twitter to your site. But I started to wonder if it is all hype. Sure the big people want us to get out there and tweet away. What a great way to be able to search all the random thoughts inside a person's head. Everyone is saying that customer service reps have started searching tweets and responding to people's rants about their products. Well, that could be useful. I tried tweeting against DHL, and got precisely the same response I got from filling out their complaint form. Zilch.

So I am starting to think that it is all hype. People are piling on board because everyone is talking about it. But I truly get the sense that once we get there, none of us know what to talk about. Certainly for all those people, including myself, trying to use it as a promotional tool, twittering gives you one more way to through your links out into cyberspace and hope for the best. I mean you can tweet about yourself all you want. But after a while, a person starts losing the umph to tweet. At least I do. I read an article today claiming that 60% of twitter users drop the service within a month. So help me out here someone. I am fast on my way to becoming one of that 60%.