follow me on twitter @okelleykevin


well, i did it. raise your hand if you're surprised.

...

me either.

almost two full years ago next month, i published this ignorant piece of bullshit. you see what i did with it? i played (by played, read: pretended to be) as nice and diplomatic as i could, but there wasn't anything in the tone of that post that said i was giving twitter an honest shot at being worth anyone's time. even in the comments that followed, i used the positive reinforcement that i got from a couple friends to feel better about just how ignorant i was being. and for almost two full years, i continued to feel the same. about it all. the 140 character limit, like my wasting my own time (and yours) on my relatively long-form blog posts somehow rendered a tweet irrelevant. the narcissistic angle. seriously, the moment i made the intentional decision to put this journal where "all the world" could see it, i struck that defense from any argument i could ever make about anything internet-related. the subject matter angle, which, really, i am bothered moreso by that than anything else as i re-read this again. in the post, i dug at comments that might alert followers to what someone may have done to their hair to what movie they felt like pimpin' in a given moment to random joe athlete pimping himself, shouting out to his fans mid-game. the reason this bothers me so much is because it's all freaking relative, right? of course it is. i say that all the time, because i believe it. what's not important to me could be EXTREMELY FUCKING important to the next person, so what right do i have to judge and gauge the importance of anything that is coming out of anyone's mouth at any given time? dammit, i hate being a moron. and i hate being a hypocrite even worse. but i am, with a capital "H".

thank god for personal growth and evolution.

a little over three weeks ago, i started warming to the world of twitter, and i published this slightly less than ignorant piece of bullshit. quickish opened my eyes to what twitter could do if someone harnessed its powers for good. each day, quickish gets more in tune with what they do, and i now visit it more often than any other site on the internet. what's funny, though, is that it has opened a canyon of interest in me that quickish alone can't seem to fill. i've asked myself, quickish is doing a masterful job of compiling and sharing with me what its editors have deemed relevant to the sports stories of the day, but what if i don't want quickish to be my editor? what if some of what they are filtering out would add quality to my sports experience or day? what if something that one of my favorite columnists says doesn't make their cut but would totally crack me up or lead me to a column that i'll chew on for days?

the more i asked myself the initial question and its obvious follow-ups, well, the answer came pretty easily and fairly quick. i didn't want quickish to be my editor. i will still lean on them to be my tipmaster and to point me in directions that i wouldn't have time to find myself (and therein lies the genius of that site), but i am going to start creating my own filter.

and so today, i opened up my brand spanking new twitter account, and i couldn't be happier.

so, are you going to tweet, too?

i'd like to tell you, honestly, that i won't. but that's every bit as ridiculous as my writing about how twitter was worthless two years ago.

what about "facebook is not twitter".

fuck that. it really bugged me on that day that i might have bugged one of my facebook friends with my quick-hit updates, but the sentiment doesn't hold water. i see many facebook friends having tied their twitter to their facebook anyway, and facebook does a good job, from what i've noticed, of grouping and consolidating multiple tweets into a ziplink that you can choose to click on or not if you are interested in looking to "see similar posts".

so, yeah, i'll probably tweet. i have no idea about what, and i have no idea how i'll differentiate between what's worth a tweet and what's worth a status update, but i am guessing i'll find my groove sooner rather than later.

thank god for personal growth and evolution, indeed.

and thank god for twitter.