Follow me

Years ago my mother in some weird effort to keep contact with her children encouraged us all to get Twitter accounts. Twitter at the time was relatively new, or at least new to me. I had heard of it, sort of. It was before Tweet had become a household phrase like Google. So to humor my mother I  signed up and I followed my friends who were currently all a-twitter. Then I proceeded to forget all about it.

My mother never tweeted anything, and oddly neither did the majority of my friends I was following. Now I must admit I managed to remember to check my account once a week so I might have been missing something there. Even though Twitter kept getting more and more popular, I never bothered to go back. I actually went and deleted my account because I saw no point in keeping it around.

Perhaps it makes me a bit of a ludite, but I have never been able to find myself wanting to do the whole Twitter thing. I am certain it is incredibly useful tool and a good means of social networking, but I have often felt I have more than my fair share of social networking. Of course I used to say the same thing about Facebook.

So out of sheer curiosity today, I set up a twitter account again. I have no good reason for doing it, I was simply bored and decided to try again to see what all the hype is about. So I opened the account, filled in my profile, and selected some people to follow. I found a few friends I know Tweet and a handful of celebrities I thought might be interesting to follow. I have only recently discovered the joy of following famous people on G+, so this is sort of a more novel idea to me than it probably should be.

I got everything set up, went to the home page, and realized I have no idea what the hell is going on. It is almost like reading status updates on FB, but at the same time it seems a lot more like listening to one end of a phone conversation. It is a little unsettling in that. Also I was almost immediately followed by half a dozen people who look like porn stars. Could someone explain to me how the hell that happened? I think there is some sort of privacy setting somewhere I might be missing and need to look into.

I haven't tweeted anything yet since no one is following me (other than porn stars) and I also am not really certain how to do it. I feel like a complete moron to be quite honest. I mean I know how to do it, I just don't know how, if that makes any sense at all. I mean I get what the @ is used for I think, but what is the # for exactly? I don't speak the language is what I suppose I am getting at.

So for now I am going to quietly lurk about and watch and try and figure out what the hell is happening. I am not even certain how to tell you to follow me if you want to, or how to follow you if you wanted me to. I mean the user name is beylit, so do I say follow me @beylit on Twitter? That sounds right and wrong all at the same time.

I think I might be hopeless. I think I am going to need a tutorial. Please feel free to share with me your sage Twitter advice. Please. Please?