Twitter Joins Me

I’ve watched Twitter from a distance for the past year or so,  sometimes making fun of it in blog comments,  but I never actually joined.

Last week I was looking at my web server log with the good old tail -f,  and found that several other bloggers had hotlinked the copy of the twitter fail whale that was in my old “What do you do if you catch an exception?” post.  It turns out that my copy of the whale currently ranks #1 in Google Image Search.  It’s not bringing in a vast amount of traffic,  but it seems to be really engaging people,  because Google blog search is finding a new reference to the image just about every day.

I’ve been spending a lot of time developing sites where that’s the whole idea:  to build virtuous circles where people find images,  put them on their sites,  link back to my site,  which attracts more visitors.  Sometimes you can succeed at this without trying,  but making a business out of it is a matter of being lucky consistently.

After that I broke down and joined twitter.  My username on twitter is paul_houle;  Right now it seems like a strange and lonely place,  but I can see some discipline in expressing oneself in 140 characters.  I’ve noticed quite a few characters already:  everything from the very corporate people who tweet in calculated sound bites to people that tweet like /dev/random.  Perhaps I can’t do anything about the “strange” bit,  but perhaps I can about the “lonely” part.  If you like the things that I blog about,  you’re certainly invited to follow me,  and I’m interested in following like minded people.