What has Twitter Done for Me in Real Life?

161 Notes

A few days ago I was contacted by Misty Harris, a reporter for Canwest News Service. She was doing an article on some Canadian Twitterers and what sort of effect it has had on their offline life — book deals, job opportunities, etc. She asked me to send her my experiences.

The article is online here: Tweets translate into fame and fortune for Canadians

But if you are interested, here is the full write-up I sent her:

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What has Twitter Done for Me in Real Life?

I get asked a lot what I’ve gotten out of Twitter. A new job? A book deal? Anything?

The fact is I’m still working at the same job, still living in the same house, still staring at the same bank account. I have no book deal. Agents do not call me. I’m still me.

But in a lot of ways, Twitter gave me back my life.

When I first joined Twitter, it was my Dad that told me to sign up. If you go back to the first page of the people I follow on Twitter, his avatar is right there at the bottom. And I used Twitter in the way that most people probably use it. I said what I was doing. I commented on things I saw. I posted some links. Nothing special.

Then, in June of 2008, my father was struck while cycling and killed instantly. He was a man that lived life to the fullest and only seemed to speed up as he got older. He was my hero and my best friend. I was devastated.

Soon after this I started to use Twitter more, trying to distract myself from the grief I felt. I started following more people on Twitter, mainly people whose websites I enjoyed and then the people they followed. And somewhere along the way I heard about a site called Favrd. (Don’t go looking for it — it’s not there any more.) I don’t remember where I read about it, but the description that stuck in my head was that it was like making your Twitter feed like “Evening at the Improv”.

Favrd was basically an aggregator of tweets that people had “favorited” (or “starred”). You can favorite a tweet on Twitter by clicking the star next to the tweet. Originally, it was designed to be a way to bookmark tweets that you liked. The people using Favrd had started to use it to indicate laughter. Favrd was pretty simple. The front page was a listing of the most recent tweets that had gotten at least three stars, while there was another page that listed the tweets that had gotten the most that day (the leaderboard). Basically, Favrd crowdsourced comedy.

Suddenly, Twitter wasn’t just a place for me to record the minutia of my day — it was a creative outlet. How do you make someone laugh in just 140 characters or less? They say limitation help creativity. This was definitely true for me. Suddenly, Twitter wasn’t just a way to pass the time — I had something to do. I had to make people laugh.

Yes, I used Twitter as an escape. But in the end, it became a doorway.

I started out trying to make people laugh, but — more importantly — I started laughing at what everyone else was writing. I started following more people, people I found funny. And people that found me funny started following me. And what do you get when people discover they make each other laugh? You get friends. I have made an *incredible* number of friends through Twitter. And no, I am not using that word lightly — I have made real, flesh-and-blood friends. I have traveled to Boston and North Carolina and San Francisco, all to meet with friends I met on Twitter. And we (my wife finally joined me on Twitter) have more trips planned for this year to Tampa, Chicago, and Toronto.

But it’s not just funny tweets and good friends that I’ve gotten out of Twitter — I’ve rediscovered my creativity.

I used to be an actor — I went to Theatre School at Dalhousie and worked as an actor for eight years. But I stopped. I found I wanted to be able have a job that allowed me the time and money to do other things beside just trying to survive as an actor. And I’ve been okay with that decision. But what I did miss was having a creative outlet. In this community, I have more creative outlets than I know what to do with — now I write, I draw, I take photos, I even make short — and very silly — films. A lot of this creativity has found its home on my Tumblr site iamyourcanadianboyfriend.com. Tumblr is a blogging community that a subset of my Twitter community has colonized. I’ve described it this way — if Twitter is the stage, Tumblr is the cast party. It’s where we can go to try our hands at different things: art, writing, photography, music, video. And still a whole lot of just trying to make each other laugh. Tumblr also allows us to share more about our lives. It has allowed us to become better friends. I know a number of people that have met through Twitter and Tumblr and fallen in love. And there are a number of us that have fallen on hard times and the community has rallied to support them. We make each other laugh. We give each other support. We cheer each other on. We push each other to try new things.

Somewhere along the way, someone at Twitter HQ decided they thought I was a good person to recommend to new users of Twitter and I was placed on the Twitter Suggested User list. That’s when my follower count started increasing by thousands a day — at the moment it’s over 1.2 million. I don’t think the majority of those people know what to make of me. I had to make a decision not to let it change how I used Twitter. All I can do is keep trying to make people laugh by posting things that make me laugh. Hopefully I’ve made some of them laugh too. (Twitter recently changed how they implement the Suggested User List, so the torrent of new followers has stopped. I’m remarkably okay with that.)

In the end, I’ve made a very tiny bit of money — two of my tweets have been made into Threadless t-shirts and I have an online store where I sell some t-shirts, mugs, and prints of the silly drawing of animals I make. Grocery and comic book money.

So far, none of this has changed my professional life.

But it has changed my life.

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(But if an agent did call…)