For the past year or so, I have been very quiet on Twitter. In fact, I went from tweeting quite often to hardly tweeting at all. I also removed / blocked Twitter from my phone. I have written many times about just how valuable Twitter has been to me / people I know. I would have to say it is one of the top 5 internet services that has had a massive impact on my life.
But anyways…I went “quiet” on Twitter because I wanted to reduce the amount of noise that entered my life. I became a consumer of content (still reading Twitter on desktop) but I really only tweeted out general announcements/big thoughts. I was still active in direct messages and still learned a ton from twitter.
I thought this was going well…until I realized I was pretty much just “undifferentiating myself” and not providing any value to my followers. I do not really view twitter as only a means to provide value to people, but I do think having a unique and honest brand is long term value in the sense that people associate your tweets with who you are.
I was too promotional and was hardly using Twitter in an interesting way.
So I am trying something new. A new twitter style.
I am starting to tweet out things I am interested in. Effectively, I am exploring my curiosities, figuring out answers to stupid questions, and digging through the archives of the internet. I do not expect this change to have a massive/any real change on my life in the short run. I do not expect anything really.
But I do find it fun to go “treasure hunting” and share the things I discover. We will see how this goes.
The tweets will be about things I am interested in, lately: cities, early internet, historical inventions, empires, sports.
Here are some examples:
The term 'Surfing the Internet' was inspired by an inspirational Apple mousepad and coined by Jean Armour Polly in 1992.
'Information Surfing' pic.twitter.com/FNutSO7sXv
— Jordan Gonen (@jrdngonen) May 23, 2018
Chinese railway development is insane.
"About 1,500 workers finished building a railway for a new train station in less than 9 hours in Longyan City." https://t.co/6c6wEVWcPT pic.twitter.com/DN7pCAAypc
— Jordan Gonen (@jrdngonen) May 23, 2018
Be sure to follow me if this interest you!