Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Twitter


I've got to admit--at the risk of showing my crepey & desiccated age--that I don't "get" Twitter. It's up to 280 characters now, at least, but even that . . . well, it ain't much, is it? The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy fence. takes 46 characters, after all, and that doesn't say shit. Oh, wait a minute. It's "dog," not "fence." That makes a little more sense. Although I'll bet lazy fences make good neighbors. "Dog" also cuts down the Character count to 44. So . . . point, set, and match.

Anyway.

How much can one say in 280 characters? According to Strain Index's Readability Monitor, the average sentence is 75 to 100 characters, so 280 is less than three sentences. 

On the one hand . . . or on the one wing? . . . it does force you to think about what you're saying. To some extent. It would for some people, anyway. Same thing for haiku. Though of course there are some people who would just fuck that up, too. Like

I was walking down
the street when I saw a man
who asked me for a

light. I said, I don't
smoke--unless I am on fire. I
thought that was pretty

fucking funny, but
he didn't even crack a 
smile. What a loser.

On the other hand, the character limitation pretty much guarantees you that at some point the idea will be expressed without nuance, and there seems to be a greater capacity for the expression of anger and bellicosity than for peace, love and understanding. (Oh-oh.)   

 So there's that. And I've opened and closed Twitter accounts a few times. I currently have 4 Followers. Is that sad, or what? (Hmm? Oh, sure. Brother K . . . @BrotherK19. Sure, you have a lock on #5. I know it sounds kind of pathetic, but hey, Jesus only had 12 followers, and one of them turned heel, so I'm thinking 4 isn't so bad. Well, 5 including you. Sure, sure. I appreciate it. Now go and tell no man.) But check this out: this blog thing has been going on for a long time. Like since 11/10/06, to be exact. And to date I've had 624,234 hits, which seems like a pretty good number to me, but my Most Visited Blog Entry is Putting the Fortune into Wheel of Fortune from Jan 11, 2012 (at 3556 hits) . . . and most of those hits came back when I had pictures of VW with her boobs hanging out . . . before I started thinking about copyright infringement / violation and that sort of thing and took everything down. 

 This morning I put up this Tweet: 


which might look familiar to long time readers. (Meaning anyone who has been to this blog previously.) And check this out:


That was within one hour, man. Now, that's probably about it. I just checked back and the count has only increased by a few in the four hours since the end of that first hour. But still. A Tweet that took me a couple of seconds to put up gets more hits than most of the entries I put up . . . and I actually put a bit of thought and time into composing most of those things. It's very strange, isn't it? How can I put this information to use? I don't know. Though I will confess that I often use Twitter as a way to attempt to drive some traffic to this blog. For the most part it doesn't work. My Morning Joe blog entry only has 9 visits as of this writing, and if the Twitter data is to be believed, only 1 of those 9 came via the Tweet. Though on other occasions this tactic has resulted in a couple of dozen click throughs, so it does work on occasion. 

Still, I don't get it. What's that man doing behind the curtain? And why is he making those AWFul noises? If you can enlighten me on this Twitter business, please do so.

P.S. So do you think I should reference this post via Twitter? I think I shall.
P.P.S. Again with the Twitter / Blog hit discrepancy: posted two Tweets on Black Panther a few hours ago. The first had a link to a blog entry on the same topic. The Tweet has had 192 hits AoTW, the blog entry has had 16. The other Tweet didn't have a link to the blog entry, but it has had 216 hits AoTW. So there you have it. Clearly the big money is in Tweets.
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