I am a Twit(ter User).

Foreword: Alas, my poor abandoned abode on the internet. Here it was, laid bare and neglected for months in a single stretch, unloved and untouched, barren and deserted, lonely and longing for the author to blow the breath of life onto it. As the owner's inspiration remained beleaguered in drought and attention occupied by other worldy matters (and distractions), it is anything but wishful thinking. Once in a while however, there is a glimpse of hope, a hope that this little presence on the wide abyss of the internet will once again flourish, fulfilling in its full potential as a window into the life and thought of the author. For now however, one has to contend with sporadic post which may or may not become the seed to revive this spot in need of more love., such as this following one right here.

After 500+ miliion users have preceded me, I have finally become a Twit...ter user.

How's that for description of self? Those who are my friend on Facebook might notice something familiar...

Despite thoroughly enveloped in the procrastinating embrace of the social media behemoth that is Facebook (1.28 billion users) as well as other worldly matter to tend to, I have made the belated move of signing up to Twitter about a month ago or so. The initial motivation to do so is fairly straightforward that is to follow what are the selected interesting people (i.e. comedians/media personalities/legend such as @Stephen Fry) that happens to be Twitter users) up to, getting first hand information as the news breaks locally and internationally (e.g. @theborneopost for news from my home or @bbcworld for the rest of the world) and catching up with bits and facts from pages of particular interest (e.g @qikipedia for Quite Interesting (tm) facts or @OED that I liked a little while ago to learn interesting English words in Oxford English Dictionary (tm)). Ohh, that random part of the internet e.g @common_squirrel or @big_ben_clock has made its presence all too soon enough. I might even favourite and retweet things that I think worth sharing (which is my current policy on Facebook status at the moment), such as THIS:

Yang Dipertua Negeri Sarawak TS Taib Mahmud terima Darjah Kebangsaan Seri Maharaja Mangku Negara yang membawa gelaran Tun dari YDP Agong
— BERNAMA (@bernamadotcom) May 26, 2014

(Oh the collective groan of bleeding hearts after getting balls twisted across Sarawak is deafening. I actually grinned gleefully with amusement and bemusement in equal proportion with this news and the knee-jerk reaction. ALL HAIL LORD WHITE HAIR.)

Within hours of setting up my Twitter however, a bemusing phenomenon have occurred.

Followers as of now. Guess which one is an actual friend I know personally? (Hint: not a woman.)

Who are these vacuous, shallow boobs-and-duckfaces "fine ladies" and why would they randomly follow a Twitter user who hasn't even get the hang of Tweeting with only a handful of Tweets anyway? As it turns out however, they're all spambots (fembots?) masquerading as legitimate Twitter account being programmed to post vague Tweets about love and I am missing you, the type of things these boobs-and-duckfaces "fine ladies" would post in hoping some idiotic men "romantic men" would follow them back and then spam them with direct message probably for malicious intent like getting your bank account or passwords. (In fact, one of them, the so-called Matty Machudri has revealed its true colour by Tweeting techno-babble of coding and commands. How did these spambots came up with their names and photos anyway? Name randomizer?) Of course, I am not one of those idiotic men romantic men so a quick visit to Settings and Secured My Tweets which allows control over who can follow me as well as not allowing my Tweets to be shared publicly.

On the subject of Follower and Following, I felt that Twitter is actually much more impersonal and less social than Facebook especially if one intent to connect with actual friends that one personally knows. At least on Facebook, the activity your friends are doing may appear on your news feed and one can feel certain your activities may appear in your friends too thus maintaining an impression of connection (it has to be said however Facebook do select which activity to appear in your news feed and one can always to to highlight or hide according to one's fancy.). For Twitter however, it is not necessarily so you can choose to follow to someone (your friends or something else) but your friend might not (and can choose not to) reciprocate thus creating a communication deficit. Then there this question of privacy whether to keep your Twitter publicly accessible (which means everyone can see you and a mere Tweet away from snowballing into a full blown free-for-all flame war with random faceless eggs bashing incoherent abusive tweets to you) or private (hence nobody barring your Followers can see your gems of wisdom or you left with aching curiosity of what are your friends' thought because they protected their Tweets).

Another peeve that I have with Twitter is course its 140 character limit in a Tweet. Being someone not exactly adept in expressing sentiments in concise manner while preferring to embellish with verbose prose (that's why all my recent posts are largely unreadable), Twitter is a very restricted and constrained medium of expression and communication. One is compelled to either deliver catchy, edgy one-liner (which some may consider as an exercise of dexterity in self-expression) or just condensing sentence into indecipherable glyph of LOLs and #. One can always circumvent the limiting factor by breaking up long sentences into multiple Tweets (cumbersome to Tweet, cumbersome to read) or if you are fluent in Chinese/Korean/Japanese, Tweet in those languages instead as 140 characters is good enough to be a paragraph for them thus one can pack more content into a single Tweet. I guess this is also why URL-shortener take off in order to allow Twitter user to share posts while being economical with the 140 character limits. With Facebook removing their character limits in Facebook status years ago (the unfortunate side effect being essay length statuses which are a pain to read and an insight to how deranged/incoherent your Facebook friend is as well as spams on public Facebook pages), Twitter's 140 character limit is seemingly regressive. Perhaps it is my own limitation too for I don't have a smooth glowing rectangle that is a smartphone with a broadband plan that allows me to take a selfie, Tweets of my whereabout, snap of what I am eating at the moment before sharing it on Twitter while on the move thus enabling Twitter of its full potential.

So as of now, Twitter for me is much more of news aggregator (mostly by @guardian. Yes I can be categorized as The Guardian reader now.) and interesting facts and links provider than performing its social function...so...Follow me? *inner voyeur talking*

For my friends who still haven't allow me to be their followers: let me follow you. Please. I beg you. *inner stalker talking*

*headdesk in shame* Anyway, just check out my Twitter @ZRLiew, aye? Yeah I know you can't see anything now because I protected my Tweets so...Follow me if you want to see anything else beyond my face and header. Then again, there's always Facebook anyway which I still spent most of my time on and have no intention to abandon at any moment.

Afterword: The end is in almost in sight. Am seeking release from the stifling bind. Let this be a peaceful or at the very least, uneventful end. But first...*continues to be distracted*