Sunday 21 February 2010

Hello again

Right! Blog number 2! Err... not really sure what to say in this one. I'm not doing anything very interesting at the moment - english essay. Actually, I'm also eating a Thornton's chocolate santa which I have only just got round to eating. I got SO much chocolate for christmas! I'm gradually getting through it all. Just finished my massive slab of Hotel Chocolat Rocky Road - it was delicious!
Anyway, my good friend Emma gave me this santa as a present and she even got them to put my name on it! Awww :-) So now I need to work out how to post pictures.... ah, I see. There's a button saying 'Add Image.' I shall click that!

There we go! Not a great quality picture, I took it on my webcam. Ah well :-)
Anyhoo, not sure why I'm going on about chocolate. I shall go on about Twitter instead.

I joined Twitter in January last year. It was just before Jonathan Ross came back to the BBC after being off for 3 months. I was googling him because I wanted to know when he was coming back. Then I came across his Twitter page. I had literally no idea what it was about - it took me a while to realised that the most recent post was at the top and past ones were below. Then I found Stephen Fry's account. I asked my mum if I could have an account like a good little girl and she said I could so I did! I quickly worked out how it worked and really started to enjoy it. Excited by my new discovery, I went straight on to MSN and asked all my friends to join. Most of them weren't as excited as me and did a couple of updates and left it at that. But a few months later, my good friends Emma and Izzy became as addicted as me! And I got my mum to sign up too! She loves it!

Since then, I have made loads of Twitter friends. Well... a few. But everyone is really nice! I don't have Facebook though. Not sure why. I suppose I see Twitter as a lot more sophisticated and adult which is what I prefer. I can tweet about politics and my views and Billy Elliot without being told I'm weird, which is nice :-) I really like the atmosphere. I have Twitter friends from all over the world - Germany, USA, Sweden, UK, umm think thats it. Well 4 countries is a good start. I'm begining to ramble so I think I should stop.

Thanks for reading!

Meg xx

3 comments:

  1. Well you are a good ambassador for Twitter and you and your mum are the reason I am on it. I don't agree with you about Facebook though. I think it gets a bad rap. I don't think it is any more, or less, sophisticated than Twitter. To be honest, in many ways they are very similar - social networking sites where you can post your status and your thoughts about things, your photos, links to things that are important to you or that you'd like others to see. I have reconnected with so many people via Facebook who I know would still not be in my life without it and Twitter hasn't done that for me. I know a lot of people my age who have used it as a way to find people from their past who they wnat to be in touch with...when you get to my age you have many chapters of life behind you and many people to reconnect with! Esp working freelance in the media. It's easy to lose touch with people you have worked with but really want to keep up with and find out what they are doing. It's a great way to share photo albums. I know there are lots of websites for sharing photos but with FB you can do everything in one place - it's a proper virtual community. I can talk to my family in New Zealand, my friends in the USA, post links to things I have written, share my photo albums (particularly important as Izzy grows up - esp for the NZ family), post songs I like etc. I talk to lots of people every day on FB. It's really been a positive thing in my life. Of course it does have silly time wasting quizzes etc (some of which I am guilty of doing but I am a superstar at time wasting) but you can ignore those. Nothing on FB is obligatory and it has really good privacy and security settings so no one can see your profile etc and less you give them permission. I can't see nay negatives - it's like anything, if used with the right intentions, it's a good thing. eg. you can use an axe to chop wood and build a nice cosy fire or you can use it to axe murder someone - but that doesn't mean there's anything inherently wrong with the axe itself! Anyway, I had to defend FB! I don't think you have to say Twitter is better than FB or vice versa - I use both after all and lots of people do. I also have people who use Myspace a lot - esp my singer/songwriter friends. They are all opportunities in our virtual playgrounds!
    So I say...good Blog No 2 Meg cause you've said something controversial and got a reaction from someone! keep going. xx

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  2. I can see why everyone likes facebook. I'm sure I'd really like it if I could just talk to the people I wanted. I know you can say no to people but for me that would cause a lot of trouble at school with certain people. With Twitter, I like everyone I talk to because the people I don't want to talk to don't have it because they use facebook and think twitter is stupid. If I had facebook, they would add me and I wouldn't want to add them and it would make everything more
    complicated at school. And since I've only just started avoiding those people at school (which has made me a lot happier) it would be stupid
    of me to provoke more arguments. At the moment, at our school, it seems that rejecting someone you know on facebook is the worst thing you
    can do and me doing that to people that I have only just got back to a 'neutral' relationship would be really silly of me. I'm sure I will
    use it at some point, maybe in sixth form, when I'm not in the social situation I seem to be in now. I wasn't trying to make out facebook itself was a bad thing, it's just that at the moment I prefer Twitter because for me, facebook would come with a lot of baggage attached. I suppose I see twitter as more adult because the majority of people I talk to on twitter are adults. I'm actually really looking forward to using FB when it would not cause any social problems. Sorry if I sounded as though I was attacking the actual concept of facebook - I wasn't trying to at all.
    I just meant that I am happy with twitter at this point in time because I can talk to all the people I want to and not the people I dont want to because they don't have it. But thats only my personal opinion. Probably none of that makes any sense! I seem to have repeated myself a lot! Looking back, it all looks very teenage and self centred. Sorry about that! Xxxx

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  3. Hey you don't need to apologise for expressing a personal view - nothing to apologise for. I was just putting another viewpoint - that's what debate and discussion are hey. You've expressed your reasons beautifully - you are such a great communicator, Meg - and I totally understand that at this stage, being involved in FB would be senseless and not an enjoyable experience at all! And it really is meant to be fun. I can see that in Twitter you have found a happy and safe virtual community and I hope it remains that way for you. Just to say though, that I think statistically you would find the same age demographic across both sites and there are plenty of oldies on FB - I have 123 friends on FB and the youngest is you! The oldest is in her fifties!
    One thing you could do if you just wnated to "hover on the edge" of FB for a while is use a psuedonym so no one you don't want to could track you down there - you don't have to post a photo or anything about your identity or anything at all but you could, for instance, see my posts because you could let me know your alias and I could invite you in! :-)
    xxx

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