6.9.10

To Tweet or Not to Tweet

I tried 'Tweeting' for a few months late last year and early this. I tried to be the Tweeter with the fewest followers in the world until the pointlessness of it all became clear and I gave up participation in favour of seeing what people more famous and interesting than me had to say about their lives.

Most of the people I follow are involved with cricket in some way, and are well-known. Graeme Swann's Tweets are ebullient and slightly childish. David Lloyd's reflect his humour and wide range of passions. Jimmy Anderson's tend towards the dull and worthy, but are notably well structured and punctuated. It's clear, unlike some, that he went to school. Agnew's reflect a life so utterly wonderful that he must wake up every day thanking some higher authority (the BBC Appointments Board, I suppose) for its munificence. Michael Vaughan is a late adopter who shows promise.

Something worth keeping in mind, though, is that if you put something on Twitter, more or less anyone, anywhere, can see it. And if they don't see it for themselves, someone will tell them about it.

If someone's responsible for selecting a cricket team that you'd like to play in, it's best only to refer to them as a c**t (or even a k**t) or a w****r in private. People generally don't like that sort of thing, and if you give them another reason not to select you, well, as good old Devon Malcolm apparently once said, 'you guys are history'.

Don't expect a call anytime soon, Dimitri.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It does have its good points - Twitter, I mean, not calling selectors c**ts - there are times when people like Bumble and Aggers let out team information before the BBC does. If you're on the ball (and assuming you care) you can get some good blogging in before others.

Sadly, the Australians don't seem to be using the technology to the extent England is. We have Shane Warne, whose grammar and spelling are atrocious and who is more interested in poker, and Michael Clarke who rarely logs in then tells us very little. We all love Bracks, who actually responds to other Tweeters - but he does have a lot of time on his hands these days!

To illustrate how effective Twitter can be I'll tell you this - I don't even follow KP yet knew about his tweet immediately. It was only up for a few minutes but it was retweeted so quickly and so many times it was too late when he pulled it down.

Brian Carpenter said...

Thanks for the comment, Sid, and welcome along. As I said in the piece I follow a limited number of players and pundits - Swann, Jimmy, Lloyd, Agnew, Vaughan - but I hadn't bothered with KP, even before the incident (let alone any of the Australians).

I guess it comes down to who you think you might be interested in and what you think of their Tweets. All the above have their moments, although I've yet to come across a sportsman who produces anything really original (although that's hardly easy in 140 characters).

Brian Carpenter said...
This comment has been removed by the author.

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