The northlondonhippy

This is a post mainly about Twitter.

I like Twit­ter, I find it incred­i­bly use­ful. Its become my go-to source for cur­rent infor­ma­tion and you’ll often find me get­ting my tweet-fix peri­od­i­cally through­out the day.

I’ve been using it that way for about 2 years, since I got my iPhone 3G and played around with the early Twit­ter clients avail­able at the time. I had a dif­fer­ent account back then, one that I sub­se­quently deleted.

Why?

Because like many peo­ple, I really didn’t get Twit­ter at first. I didn’t know where to start. I tried to dive into the deep end, before even read­ing a pam­phlet on how to swim. I expect this expe­ri­ence is not uncommon.

I did con­tinue to flirt with Twit­ter, search­ing for top­ics of inter­est, or using the iPhone GPS to search for tweets local to me. It worked, to a point, but I really wasn’t that engaged or con­nected to any of it.

Around 6 months after my ini­tial explo­ration, Twit­ter started to make more sense. It didn’t hurt that the main­stream media was start­ing to get on the Twit­ter band­wagon. I learned more about Twit­ter and it started to make sense to me and in Jan­u­ary 2009, I signed up for another account, which is my cur­rent one: @nthlondonhippy

I now fol­low over 1,000 accounts. I thought about tweet­ing to mark this mile­stone, since peo­ple are always tweet­ing when they reach big round num­bers of fol­low­ers, I thought it would ironic and amus­ing to tweet the exact oppo­site by brag­ging about the num­ber of accounts I fol­low. Its funny, because all num­bers on Twit­ter are unim­por­tant, how many fol­low­ers you have, how many you fol­low, the num­ber of tweets you’ve sent, it doesn’t matter.

What mat­ters is what you get out of Twitter.

When peo­ple I know ask me about using Twit­ter, that’s usu­ally my first ques­tion back to them: What do you want to get from Twit­ter? Most of them don’t know, because they don’t know what Twit­ter can offer.

It offers a lot, it offers every­thing. It offers far more than you could ever want or need and with­out some sort of focus on what you hope to gain, you’ll never get any where with it.

I take a lot from Twit­ter, but that which I take is will­ingly given. What I really mean by that is that many of the 1,000 plus accounts I fol­low belong to web­sites and are tweeted, not by peo­ple, but by ser­vices such as TwitterFeed.

When a web­site updates with a new story, or blog post, a tweet is gen­er­ated by Twit­ter­Feed via the website’s RSS feed. My web­site does this and these days most do. When I post this finely crafted and immi­nently rel­e­vant bit of copy to my web­site, it auto­mat­i­cally updates its RSS feed, which is then picked up and tweeted within 15 min­utes or less via my Twit­ter account. I’m not going to get any more tech­ni­cal than this, so don’t worry.

There is so much use­ful infor­ma­tion avail­able on Twit­ter, what­ever your par­tic­u­lar inter­est, its just a ques­tion of start­ing an account for your­self and look­ing for inter­est­ing sources to fol­low. This takes time and some per­se­ver­ance, but the rewards are immense.

But Twitter’s not just about the lat­est news, its also about what real peo­ple, like you and me (I’m not actu­ally real) had for break­fast. This is where I fail at Twitter.

I’m nowhere near as engaged with indi­vid­u­als on Twit­ter as I should be or as I would like to be. I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that social media is just an exten­sion of nor­mal, real world soci­ety and if you are socially awk­ward in the real world, then you’re going to be socially awk­ward online.

I don’t mean I am some sort of unwashed pariah, fart­ing and belch­ing when­ever I’m in the com­pany of nor­mal folk, I save that for when I’m in the com­pany of super­mod­els. What I mean is, I’m quite a loner in real life, happy with my own com­pany and the world inside my head. I only really have a few peo­ple close to me and that’s prob­a­bly been true my whole life.

I don’t actively seek out indi­vid­u­als with sim­i­lar inter­ests to fol­low on Twit­ter, and I should. I would say most of the peo­ple I fol­low on Twit­ter, I didn’t find, they found me and I fol­lowed them back. I don’t actively look for peo­ple to fol­low with the same vigour I seek out news and infor­ma­tion sources. I’m com­ing to realise this is a mistake.

By my own admis­sion, I take a lot from Twit­ter, but now I would like to try to give some­thing back.

Here’s my cun­ning plan:

On Weds 16 June 2010, I will be con­duct­ing the very first #help­ful­hippy day. For the entire day, I will be avail­able on Twit­ter to help other users in any way I can, whether they fol­low me or not. I will be actively, pos­si­bly even aggres­sively, search­ing for unan­swered ques­tions and other pleas for assis­tance and doing my best to help out.

I won’t be directly pro­vid­ing cash, drugs, hook­ers or any­thing else peo­ple really need, but it is my sin­cer­est hope to, in what­ever small ways, lend sup­port, offer assis­tance, exper­tise and advice to any­one I can.

Maybe you need some­one to retweet a char­ity plea because you’re look­ing for spon­sors for your 10K run, or per­haps you’re strug­gling to remem­ber the name of an actor from an obscure film you saw. Maybe you just need some­one to tweet with you, I can do that. If its within my abil­i­ties and I can help via a tweet or two, I will.

I don’t know if this will be suc­cess­ful and at the point I’m not too wor­ried about that, I am going to be here ready to help regard­less of how it goes. I’m not going to be shy, either. I’m aim­ing for pos­i­tive, life-affirming inter­ac­tions with as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble. I want to con­tribute some­thing, I want to pay back some­thing to Twit­ter, because I think my debt is too high.

Play­ing along at home couldn’t be eas­ier, if you think I can help with some­thing, tweet me (any time, not just next Weds) at @northlondonhippy and I’ll see it. Or you can use my spe­cial hash­tag that I will be tag­ging all of my tweets that day with: #helpfulhippy

Think of this as not only me try­ing to give some­thing back, but also an exper­i­ment in social engage­ment. If it does work, this won’t be the last time I attempt some­thing like this.

So remem­ber, this is hap­pen­ing next Wednes­day, 16th June, from when­ever I wake up, till when­ever I go to bed, exclud­ing breaks for the toi­let and pay­ing for take-away deliv­er­ies. You didn’t think I was going to cook too, did you?

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