Simon Oliver

Ever since I chanced upon the Tweetdeck my life has marched to the rhythm of incoming tweets glowing on the screen. Well, it’s only been three days but it has leached whatever good intentions I had for working  seriously out of my system.

Within this short space of time one learns to mentally filter the tweets into 3 distinct categories:

1. “Hello world: I’m having breakfast” – where people reply to the basic Twitterquest ‘What are you doing now?’

2. “Get rich quick” –  shameless pushing of music, MLM sites or other consumerism

3. “Breaking news reports” – short news items of importance with links to the lowdown. The Ryan report in Ireland  and the Commons expenses scandal are examples

The first and second of these categories are of little interest past the first day of twittering whereas the third section can cause manic dysfunction to the man at the screen.  There’s something called PICAMP going on in Belfast this week? That sounds interesting. Click … and away we go through mists of time to what we thought we knew about but clearly don’t.

There is an insidious first/fourth category when the ‘what are you doing’ tweet becomes part of a narrative that, by clever crafting of the text, becomes as addictive as a Soprano’s series.  So @unarocks is in Amsterdam waiting for a friend? Now she’s listening to a band. Begod, she’s out drinking pints of Heineken with the lead singer in wet and windy ‘Dam!

By piecing together various tweets of this type from a given location – say Dublin – one can almost reconstruct a virtual image or Street View of Tweeters’ lives as they carouse from South William Street to Westmoreland Street passing through Trinity Ball on their way.

Twitter is like having gobbets of Ulysses been thrown at your windscreen as you fiddle with the GPS in downtown Dublin.