Fun with Twitter: Do your “overheards” tell a story?

One of the joys many people, including myself, find with Twitter is the beauty of the tweeted “overheard” statement, which is some odd statement that is, well, overheard, that you just feel compelled to share with the rest of the world. (Because of character constraints, “OH:” is usually used before the statement instead of “Overheard” though I confess when I first saw people using this I wondered what Ohio had to do with anything.)

Usually neither attribution nor context is given, which makes them that much funnier. In fact, in my office, it’s become somewhat of a competition between coworkers to see who makes my “overheard” tweets. I work with a very creative, linguistic bunch and there’s never a dull moment in our conversations. My overheard tweets aren’t always coworkers, mind you, oftentimes they’re friends outside the office, like at gigs or something.

Anyway, the other day I decided to see which gems I had tweeted “OH:” recently, so  I went to my profile and searched “OH:” in my tweets only. Twitter only archives the past few days now, which I just learned, but the tweets in my past few days’ archives were not only hilarious, but kind of sounded like a funny story if you read them in chronological order.

Keep in mind that NONE of these tweets are related in any way, shape or form, and most had completely different contexts:

To “get it,” you have to read from the bottom up, but to make it easier, here they are in succession:

“That’s like, WAAAAAY down the road. Like Friday.”

“Haven’t you seen Subway commercials? Don’t you know the right way to say it?”

“I wore so much black I out-blacked myself. Black is the new black!”

“You are the reason that dress was invented.”

“Woo! It’s nice and bright in here! It makes me wanna take this dress off!” #unrelatedtothelasttweet

“We’re going to drool all over her like a pork chop.”

“… and it doesn’t give you the risk of having quintuplets!”

“You just want me for my numbers.”

“You gotta perpetuate the SEO-ness of your lineage.”

“Who the hell are you and why are you soliciting me?!”

OK, maybe it’s only funny to me, but I’m curious to see if anybody else’s completely unrelated overheard tweets also look like they kinda tell a story. It’s an interesting and fun exercise.

Here’s what you do:

1. Just view your own profile on Twitter.
2. Plug “OH:” (or “overheard,” whichever you use) into the search box and make sure that the box is checked to read only your own tweets.
3. Read from the bottom up.
4. Do they kinda tell a story?
5. If so, take a screen shot & share.

Come on, you know you want to. It’s fun!

The secret to my (alleged) Twitter “success” revealed

There’s nothing like tweeting about blogging and blogging about tweeting to beat a dead horse into the ground, eh?

Guess what?

I’m doing it anyway.

Last week a friend messaged me on BlackBerry messenger about something, I don’t remember the exact context, but somewhere along the line I decided to send him a link in a direct message (DM) via Twitter, and realized he wasn’t following me. So I asked him why, and he said he was “trying a different approach to his Twitter strategy” and he unfollowed a lot of people in order to reduce the noise in his stream. His logic was that if he wanted to talk to me, see what was up with me lately, etc., we’re connected on Facebook and of course, BlackBerry messenger.

I can respect that.

However, it spurned an interesting conversation about “Twitter strategies.” People put a lot of time and effort into trying to figure out how to best use this tiny tool of epic proportions. Ari Herzog has been experimenting with it and documenting his findings, which, from an analytical perspective, is very interesting.

People ask me what my Twitter strategy is quite a bit. To my knowledge, I’ve never really divulged the details of what it is in writing, until now.

Are you ready? After the jump, you’ll find out my own personal Twitter strategy. (If you came here on a direct link, you won’t see the “Read more” thing.)

Read more

I can quit Twitter, but Twitter can’t quit me.

Between friends getting married, friends passing away, getting used to a new schedule, and just overall life things, you could say I’ve had a lot going on lately. Sometimes, one can only take so much before wanting/needing to pull the plug on some things that cause more noise than signal in life.

The other day, after attending the funeral of a friend, I decided to quit Twitter for a while.

Many didn’t think I could do it. I’ve tried to “take a Twitter hiatus” before, and have only lasted a few days, at most. This time, however, I was pretty sure that I was done spewing <140 character blurts into the ether for a while. I just needed my “Stacy time,” my time to be lost in my own thoughts without the internet bugging me or me bugging it.

I really thought I could do it.

Fat chance.

It didn’t occur to me until after I had posted the above that even when I have no intention of tweeting, I tweet anyway. I’ve integrated so many webby things with my Twitter account that it’s nearly impossible.

Hitting the “Tweet this” button at the top of an interesting blog post or article after reading it has become second nature to me. BOOM! There’s a tweet.

If I subscribe to a YouTube channel? BOOM! There’s a tweet.

If I just “like” a video on YouTube? BOOM! There’s a tweet.

If I check in somewhere on FourSquare? You got it — BOOM! There’s a tweet.

You get the idea.

Not to mention, that if somebody chooses to retweet (RT) or reply to one of my auto-tweeted tweets, it’s usually appropriate to say something back to them.

Oh sure, I could manually go and remove all of my Twitter connections/integrations on each app, but really, that’s a lot to go though if I’m only planning on a temporary hiatus. Plus, I’d have to re-hook it all back up when I came back.

So I guess I’m stuck tweeting, whether I intend to or not.

I guess I just find it funny — these days, there are still hoards of people trying to figure out HOW to use Twitter and why; meanwhile, I’m so enmeshed in it that I can’t easily quit using Twitter, even if I wanted to.

Has anybody else had this problem?!

Just when I think it’s safe to play #FollowFriday again.

It’s no secret that I hate the Twitter meme of #FollowFriday. I wrote a rant post back in March about why I’m not playing anymore, and I’ve stood by that pretty adamantly. Ari Herzog, who wrote a recent post about the meme, shares the same sentiment as I do, which is,

I recommend Twitter users every day–when retweeting their thoughts or web links, when thanking them for prior advice, or when singling out unique people.

I thought that the madness of the random, meaningless, lists of people to #FollowFriday (or #FF) recommend had ended since I wrote that post in March. I thought that things had calmed down.

So last Friday I dipped my toe back into the Follow Friday meme and posted a #FF recommendation and gave reason as to WHY people should follow that person, as one should. So far, so good.

Today I tweeted that I lost half a cookie in my morning coffee, in melodramatic distraught. Next thing I know, Cookie Monster is following me on Twitter. The Official Cookie Monster (not to be confused with all those Cookie Monster impostors out there, mind you). I felt rather honored that such Muppet royalty would follow me, so I recommended him for #FollowFriday. After all, his Twitter account is hilarious … assuming that’s the real Official Cookie Monster and not some paid personal Muppet assistant.

I was away from my computer the majority of the day. I came back and checked my notifications to find the usual handful of random people following me that I had never heard of. I always check out each individual person that follows me to 1) make sure they’re not a bot, and 2) see if they’re anybody I find interesting enough to follow in the 3 second glance I take at their profile.

One such profile was this, and I took sympathy on the woman to attempt to protect her identity and those of the people in her background:

Pardon my french, but…

WHAT THE HELL?!?!

Tweeple: Pwease stop tawking wike Tweety Bird

Since the advent of Twitter, and especially the ever-increasing popularity of its API, there has been an explosion of third-party applications using “tw-” as a prefix. We can list ourselves and find people by profession on  Twellow, measure somebody’s Twinfluence, watch and tweet Twiddeos, and if we have OS X, tweet from our dashboard via Twidget. The list of apps is practically infinite.

Of course, just as naturally, I suppose, has our lexicon increasingly been speckled with the “tw-” prefixed words, referring to anything Twitter-related. We have “tweetups,” refer to each other as “tweeple” or “tweeps,” the world of Twitter is known as the “Twitterverse,” and if we accidentally send a direct message to the public it’s a “twoops.”

There is no shortage of Twitter glossaries out there, but seriously, I think we’ve gone a little too far. The following is not something I am unlikely to hear in real life:

I went to a tweetup to meet my tweeple and got caught in twaffic, but once I got there it was twitterific!  What tweethearts they are! As we were enjoying twitteritas, one twude twinterjected and made a twitfessional that he needed a twatcation because his wife twinks he’s a twitaholic. We said that was twitdiculous!

Seriously?!

Look, folks – I understand the enthusiasm for Twitter. It’s wonderful. I’m practically married to it. But, please, please, PUH-LEASE–

STOP TALKING LIKE TWEETY BIRD!

It’s not cute, it’s not funny, it’s not even coherent most of the time. I don’t mean to be a “mean ol’ puddy tat” here, but every time I hear an adult confound the English language with such absurd Tweety Bird talk, I don’t want to follow them on Twitter — I want to put a helmet on them, give them some crayons, and take their cell phone away.

Is this just my exaggerated imagination, or are you hearing it, too?

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