Max D. Zellmer Politics, Macs, Football & Me – And all I care about…

Breaking the camel’s back

Let’s not talk about Mr. Westerwave. Let’s not talk about any other ministers, like, well, you know who. Everyone talks about them. But I’m up to something else.

Some time ago I read on Adam Jackson’s Website that he had ten Twitter-accounts. Now in a world where most people say “Wtf is that, anyway? I don’t need no f***ing Twitter-account,” I said to myself, “what the heck could one need ten of them for?”

Now as time went by, I understood that Twitter can not only be useful for companies to do some effective marketing or for university departments to tell their students about schedules and office hours. You can even use it for research. And I think that is what I’ll be going to examine in my M.A.-thesis. Right now I administrate nine Twitter-accounts, though only two or three of them are in daily use.

Those of you who use Twitter know that it’s not only a shorter text message you send to everyone who wants to read it. A lot of features allow Tweets to be more than that. You can add pictures, URLs (even very long ones if you use a URL shortening service), tags and even information about your or anyone’s location.

You can use multiple accounts if you want to seperate private Tweets from business Tweets, bilateral from multilateral communication, jokes from more serious things, and so on. Maybe you know someone who wants to have a Twitter-account to spread news about products or their blog and don’t want to look after it by themselves, so you do it. There are even tools for remote controlling your computer via Twitter that you can use by logging your computer at home into a seperate account.

Now you may ask youself: What’s that got to do with breaking the camel’s back? I just went too far by setting up Twitter-accounts for our cats, Yoda and Chewbacca. Maybe you want to follow them, they’re actually kind of COOL.

I’m waiting for a twitter-ready fridge for home that tweets things like “oh no, I just ran out of #cheese” or “two hours ago i had 6 bottles of beer inside. Now they’re gone. Maybe there is a party in the living room”..
But using one account for fun stuff and one account for business is like how most people use different social networks for different parts of their identity. No one posts private things on xing and nobody (hopefully) will get is boss as farmville-neighbor..