Nathan Bransford - The Forums

While I do spend some time on Twitter not getting any writing done, it really is Facebook that sucks away all my free time! I spend way too much time on there!

Okay, so I'm seriously considering joining Twitter. Problem is, I know nothing about it! It's not all that big here in Oz, but I have found it amusing following a few people over in the US. Any advice for a newbie?

Jaime wrote:Okay, so I'm seriously considering joining Twitter. Problem is, I know nothing about it! It's not all that big here in Oz, but I have found it amusing following a few people over in the US. Any advice for a newbie?

1. Don't tweet about every single thing you're doing
2. Don't entirely avoid random commentary on things you're doing
3. A lot of advice out there is conflicting, but one solid, mostly across-the-board piece out there is pretty much the same as with a book: Consider your audience. Most of the people who follow me on Twitter (who are actual people and not pornbots) are my friends. So, who's going to be following you?

I prefer Facebook for sure...because I tried using twitter, but it iss very limited, and Facebook is much more user friendly. On Facebook you u can talk to your friends a lot better, and twitter is more of a group following type thing..

I have facebook open right now... and always. I was supposed to get back to my editing *checks watch* 35 minutes ago. dammit.

I would never have any interest in Twitter... not in a million years. Limiting the user to 120 words to express himself? No blogs? Not my thing at all. From time to time I do write blogs and even "essays" on Facebook but no one seems to take much interest in them :( They''d rather talk about how drunk they got the night before, who's dating who, etc.

Twitter. Definitely Twitter. I've met so many wonderful writers that way. :)

This is complicated.

I use Facebook, but I hate Facebook. Or rather, the company running Facebook. I hate their privacy practices (or rather, lack there of) and they've recently made available everyone's phone numbers to the general public. This is important because once upon a time phone numbers were used as part of the confirmation process that you were a real person, so people had to enter them to start their account. This was before I started using it so I don't know for sure how it was set up, but as I understand it originally it was made private and you had to manually make it public. So people forgot it was there. Well now everyone's numbers are viewable by anyone if they add you to their phonebook list. You have to manually delete your number if you don't want it there. To see who on your friend's lists are viewable (and they may not know it) click on Account in the upper right corner, go down to "edit friends". On the page that comes up, on the left side, click on "Phone book." It'll show you everyone on your friend's list that have their numbers made available either with their awareness or not.

Anyway, I'm really irritated with Facebook, and if it wasn't for several people I'm friends with there that I'm not other places, I probably wouldn't be there.

However I'm still uncomfortable with Twitter. I have an account, I've had one for a long time. But I don't use it much. I set my blog to automatically update there, but that's about it. I just haven't figured out how to make Twitter work well for me. Twitter makes me feel claustrophobic.

Facebook, way too much sometimes, though not nearly as much as I spend on here now. I don't use Twitter at all, don't understand it.