With a bit of an irony, I'm writing this during a free moment that was handed to me because Twitter has crashed. It was supposed to be a break from the social networking tool, but then people around me started acting like their life's purpose had been lost. So, I decided, it was a good time to do what is only my second article on Twitter to date.
I'm not addicted to it. At least not yet. But the way I watch the World Cup has changed, with one eye dashing to the computer screen every time a goal is scored. To romanticise it, Twitter has inflamed the human urge to have friends. To be honest about it, maybe we all should see a doctor.
Anyway, after more than four months since my very first "tweet", I've adapted quite a lot. If you notice, my sentences have become shorter. And if you had access to drafts of my articles, you would see that I was missing articles for fun (no pun intended). Those are only some of the things that I've learned from Twitter. The rest of them are:
1. Followers (or most of them) are king. They are why you tweet in the first place, so always be thankful and respectful.
2. You can never know which way your twitter jokes are going to go.
3. @mojijoy is a great painter, and she tweets about what she feels like eating all the time.
4. Only cover girls and boys play Twitter.
5. Once you click "send", your tweets become your boss. You can try to "correct" earlier wrong information you tweeted in the morning, but then a sleepyhead with a hangover with 2,500 followers will find that original tweet at 8pm and it will be all over.
6. @Dany_k likes to torture hard-working, hungry people with food photos.
7. "Hag a nice" is Thai youngsters' twitter slang whose meaning I have yet to find out. Best guess is it comes from "Have a nice day".
8. WTF!!! is not considered rude. Or so it seems.
9. @oldskooldi more often than not tweets herself to sleep.
10. When Twitter is down, instead of going out and doing something else, "tweeple" try to push their complaints through Twitter.
11. There's a very thin line between looking very clever or extremely foolish on Twitter.
12. I suspect that a good portion of my followers are silent enemies. LOL
13. "LOL" is probably highly overused. Not when people put it at the end of my tweets, though.
14. And even a larger portion are hi-tech experts.
15. You disappear for one day on Twitter and people start flagging Interpol and filing missing person reports.
16. People are nice to strangers.
17. Having said that, real friendship can really blossom after a few DMs.
18. Avatars don't lie. They fantasise.
19. How do people with 1 million followers read the "mentions" section?
20. To tweetple, watching the World Cup without tweeting live scores is a crime punishable by death.
21. Tweetdeck sounds like a submarine.
22. Tweetdeck and other Twitter tools lie all the time. They say "having problems updating" your posts, only to fool you into clicking "send" repeatedly and proudly displying five identical messages that begin with "Ok, I'm going to say this just once..."
23. People get "hungry", "bored", "sleepy" all the time. It's a mystery why I have never once seen an "I'm in the loo" tweet.
24. @pookem became a Twitter star overnight with information about military intrigues, and then learned a good lesson that he should stay away from sex stuff.
25. No tweet goes unpunished. Someone, somewhere will likely notice something he or she doesn't like and let you know about it.
26. Twitter is the future of news. What it will do to the already doubtful future of newspapers is another matter.
27. A rule of thumb is that when someone is not nice to you for the first time on Twitter, it must be presumed that he or she may be having a bad day.
28. There exists a lucky Thai Liverpool fan as @akadej, who has been watching games at Anfield every other week.
29. Thais all over the world are as concerned as we are about the country's situation. Women feel very strong about politics.
30. Americans follow the World Cup (the match against England) with the enthusiasm of teenage boys exploring the world, but the emotions of Buddhist monks.