Twitter: 3 pluses, 3 minuses

(image credit)

This week I offer quick hits on social media sites, that I use actively:

Pluses

1. Just one word, number one plus: sports.  I began to get active on Twitter three years ago, and for a long while bemoaned its lack of connectedness and engagement.  That is, I discovered live sports generate quite a lot of that, and specifically I love tweeting during Chicago Blackhawks and Bears games.
2. Tweetchats were an event by Lead With Giants, which I participated in actively last year. The facilitator prompts us with queries, then several of us tweet back with thoughts, ideas and suggestions. It's active and spirited.  I'm no longer active with LWG, but in the meantime four colleagues and I have deepened our friendships via Twitter.
3. I used to struggle with its 140-character limit.  But I've found that conversation in general, that is, face to face, is a bunch of quick hits of words.  So Twitter is, ironically for me, perfectly suited for conversation.

Minuses

1. When I do want to post a more elaborate, complicated message, I have to do so in a series of tweets.  At times, for example, I'll tweet the same article or image two or three times, in order to accommodate a relatively lengthy message.
2. Twitter Timeline is linear, and in a rapid fire chat, volume can build up and make it difficult to track previous tweets.  There have been occasions, where I scrolled for several minutes to find what I was looking for.
3. More and more spam has cropped up. These are followers with a cute lady for an avatar, but their tweets are nonsense, commercial or quasi-pornographic.  Instead of going through the inconvenience of blocking them, I simply don't follow back.