Friday, April 17, 2009

Twitter vs. Facebook

I finally figured it out. I may be the last one, but I am a little slow, so bear with me.

Facebook allows for cross-posting your tweets to FB, but it's pointless. If I follow you on FB, I don't need to see the same posts on Twitter and vice versa.

What I have come to realize is that Twitter and FB updates have their own unique purposes.

FB friends are people I know in real life (for the most part), so those updates can be more personal.

On Twitter I am followed by many people I've never met. They could (presumably) not care less about what I'm eating for dinner, how much I love my new shoes, etc. (Of course, it is debatable as to whether my FB friends care either, but that is a different story.)

After the election I stopped using Twitter for a while because of all the duplicate posts. I loved watching the debates with Twitter, but after that, my interest waned considerably.

Now I have it figured out. Twitter is useful to me for one thing only: discussions about toics of common interest. Topics may include news, conferences, movies, beers, restaurants, brands, etc.

Twitter is a public forum. If I tweet about the Beer Wars movie, people from around the country are going to soon search on "beerwars", see my comments and those by everyone else tweeting about the movie. It's a shared experience like nothing else I can think of. And, actually, it's pretty fabulous. I'm all fired up about Twitter again.

And now I'm going to unfollow all of my Twitter friends who cross-post to FB. It's nothing personal, guys. If you decide to separate the two, please post a message on FB so that I can start following you again.

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

No, not yoga for dogs

Thanks for all the feedback about the yoga and pilates classes. Maybe I was jumping the gun a tad by thinking I should buy a year-long membership after taking only one class. (Actually, I was only going to buy a 3-month membership. Much more reasonable.)

I went to a beginner yoga class last night and then I bought two 10-packs, one for yoga and one for pilates.

I cannot adequately describe how beneficial this yoga class was for me. I felt relaxed and appreciated and safe and content. Is that how yoga usually goes? I've only done it maybe 2 or 3 times in my life and it was always in a big class with very little personal attention.

This class only had three students. The instructor (who is the same person who teaches the pilates classes) showed us (me, really) variations on every pose. With almost every pose she walked around to check that each of us had more or less the correct form.

She said the yoga classes never get much bigger than a few people. I find that surprising, but maybe it's because there are other yoga studios all around.

I kind of want to go every day, but I'm going to wait until next Monday to go back. Maybe I'm just a little bit too excited about taking these classes.