4 Unintended Uses for Twitter

This wasn’t my first choice of picture, but the one I wanted to use would have gotten me fired from my own blog.

In some ways, Twitter has been a big disappointment for me. First of all, nobody has sent me pictures of their body parts. I was under the impression that if you joined Twitter, people would automatically tweet pictures of their body parts to you, and it hasn’t happened. Maybe I’m supposed to tweet my body parts first, but I’m not the kind of person who does that. I could get fired from my job for tweeting body parts, but I can’t get fired for looking at tweets of body parts, as long as I do it at home and not at work.

Also, I can’t read all the tweets.   At first, I tried to follow a bunch of people, but most of them tweeted so much that I couldn’t keep up with everybody’s tweets, and so I unfollowed a bunch of people who tweeted too much so that I could actually read the tweets of people who tweeted at a reasonable rate. I guess I’m the Bizarro Twitter user. I appreciate people who use Twitter infrequently. The less you use Twitter, the more likely I am to follow you.

Everybody knows that Twitter has three intended uses: to send out pictures of body parts, to self-promote projects, and to be the first to tell lame jokes about current events.   Even though I don’t use Twitter the way most people do (I’ve tried but failed miserably), I still have several unintended uses for it.

1. Twitter helps me figure out what is cool.

Twitter tells me right away what’s cool. As a middle aged guy, I lost track of what’s cool a long time ago, but Twitter lets me know right away. In the last few months, I’ve learned that a bunch of people I’ve never heard of are famous and cool. I won’t use their names because they’re already famous and cool, and they don’t need me repeating their names. In fact, if a guy like me starts saying these people are famous and cool, they’ll suddenly become unpopular and then they’ll end up in rehab. They’ll probably end up in rehab anyway, but I don’t want to be the cause of it.

2. Twitter shows me that famous people are boring.

I followed a few famous people at first and quickly realized that their tweets were more boring than mine. The good thing about famous people’s tweets, however, is that a lot of people respond to them. It’s good that famous people use Twitter because without famous people, there’d be no conversation starters. Twitter would be a jumble of aimless comments with no responses. If you want to join an actual conversation, follow a famous person and jump in. But then I realized I didn’t like any of the famous people’s tweets/threads, so I unfollowed all the famous people.

Some people get mad when you unfollow them, but the famous people didn’t care. None of the famous people unfollowed me after I unfollowed them. Of course, none of the famous people were following me anyway, but it was still nice of them not to unfollow me.

3.  Twitter helps me do research.

I didn’t think I’d be able to do research on Twitter, but I was wrong. When I search a topic or hash tag, I always find something unexpected and useful. I’ve found lots of great book sites, literature sites, and writing sites because of Twitter. They’re great sites, but none of them have interesting tweets. Because they don’t have interesting tweets, I don’t follow the blog/sites on Twitter. I found them because of Twitter, but I don’t follow them on Twitter.

I would tell you what these blogs/sites are, but I’ve just said their tweets aren’t interesting (then again, neither are mine), and I don’t want to insult them by calling them out. I don’t want to make enemies because of Twitter, especially when I don’t use Twitter very much.

4. Twitter allows me to peek into other people’s lives.

I’ve been able to learn a lot about a bunch of random people on Twitter just by jumping from tweet to tweet. People put waaaaayyyyy too much information and waaaaayyyyy too many pictures of themselves on Twitter (not many body parts, though). If I were a creepy guy, I could immerse myself in Twitter in a lot of weird ways. But I know I’m not that kind of a creepy guy because I’ve chosen not to immerse myself like that.

I’m just saying that creepy guys COULD use info and pictures in a lot of weird ways.

But I don’t.

But some creepy guys could if they wanted to.

But I don’t.

And I won’t because I’m just a normal person.

I’m just saying that Twitter COULD be used like that, and it probably wasn’t its intended use, but I don’t use it like that.

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Just because I don’t use Twitter much (even for creepy purposes) doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it. I just don’t use it. I’m more of a blogger that a tweeter. I can barely complete my thoughts in 800-1,000 words.  But even though I don’t write on Twitter a lot, I can use it for other productive purposes.  And I promise, they’re the NON-creepy purposes.  I promise.

But enough about me! What unintended uses have you discovered for Twitter?  Do any famous people actually send interesting tweets? And most importantly, has anybody ever tweeted body parts to you?

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Speaking of body parts, if you want to see the picture that would have gotten me fired from my own blog, click here.