The tweets and the bees

I NORMALLY get the hang of social networking sites very easily, MySpace? Yup. Facebook? Yup. Bebo? No, I'm not 14. 

So after a news-training course at work, I was feeling particularly inspired to sign up to Twitter (yes I'm aware I'm about two years behind the rest of the world). The benefits for keeping up-to-date and looking out for potential stories were highlighted and I thought it would be very exciting. Uploaded my photo, linked this site to it, hunted down celebrities to follow and wrote a couple of tweets.

Within a day I had three random people following me. Fantastic, going by those statistics, I should have an army of followers within a month.

However a few days later I had lost two of them. Clearly they weren't impressed by my tweets: "Why are there so many bumble bees this year?" and "I keep finding glitter on my skin, maybe I lose it through my pores."  So for a day or two after that, I was suddenly scared to tweet - just incase I lost my one remaining follower.  And I felt ashamed, I did want to announce my new Twitter profile to my Fbook friends but then worried that they would laugh at the one-follower freak.

I searched through other tweeters - and I'm still failing to see the difference between my bumble bee observation, and someone else who has nearly 200 followers and their latest tweet was about buying asparagus. And the person wasn't even famous.

And that's another can of worms: you can follow celebrities.  You can literally keep up to date with what they are doing daily. If I tried to follow them in real life and watch them pop into Asda for a packet of Nik Naks or try to climb in the same black cab, I would have a restraining order slapped on me in no time.  The cynic in me asks how long will it be before some American wins a legal case against a celeb for stalking them because they were already posting that info on a tweet anyway?

Obviously the celebs have high numbers of followers and it's a good way to keep fans updated; I can see how Twitter works from that perspective. 

So I don't know how much longer I will keep tweeting. I'm confused by all of the little symbols you need to use; and the fact you have to shorten links; and I'm already feeling trapped by the 140 character limit; and generally for something which offers the virtual spacial equivalent of a Post-It note, it is causing me so much more stress than I had expected.

Perhaps I'll just concentrate on answering the great bumble bee question and keep my thoughts to myself.