It’s a bit ironic that I’ve become a Twitter user.

When I first saw Twitter, I thought it was the dumbest thing I’d ever seen. Back in those days, Twitter had a public feed of Twitters from everyone right on their home page. I failed to see why anyone would want to read or contribute to such a feed.  Besides, doesn’t Facebook do the same thing.

I began to be pushed towards the edge by the sheer amount of advertising and app crap in the Facebook news feed.  (See Are Facebook Apps killing Facebook?)

The light started to dawn for me when my Mergelab feed helped me discover Twitter feeds for people I knew without having to manually look them up. 

All of a sudden, I was able to view ongoing Twitter conversations between people I actually knew and cared about, and I came to understand that Twitter is really a kind of group chat or instant messaging among friends. 

Posts like Kate’s Why I Twitter and Alan’s Twitter is way better than Facebook also helped me understand what was going on. 

After lurking in those conversations for long enough, it was only a matter of time before I wanted to join in.