milestones don’t come every day: lately, i have been thinking about the importance of my twitter account. a few days ago i saw that i was less than one hundred tweets away from number 10,000…and it got me thinking. ive always felt like milestones like these should be observed by posting something worthy of such an occasion.
i don’t have a thing to wear: as today approached, i realized that i really wanted to make it count- but i had no ideas. then i remembered this blog, and decided to ask myself some questions.
why do i tweet #iranelection? to help it trend and keep it in the world eye? do i want to educate people about freedom and human rights issues? is it to provide useful information to people who need it? do i want people to follow my account as a reliable source? when i created my account, i wanted to do all of these things…i still do.
if you build it, they will come: i have always believed that trending and education should go hand in hand. bring the eyes to #iranelection, and then show them why these issues should be important to them. to that end, i built an application and loaded it up with hundreds of inspiring quotes about freedom and success. izombie is great for posting happy thoughts and it frees up time to do other things…when you tweet quotes, people follow you and retweet you a lot, but after awhile, i think people tend to just tune you out, or stop following you. in an effort to help, i believe i have made the ‘reliable information’ harder to find.
shameless self promotion: i dont speak farsi, i dont trust links. i hate the idea of passing bad information to someone else. i dont actively follow news in iran- or in my own country. its just not in my nature. i tried to keep up and post links to news clips, but ive always believed that you should stick to what you’re good at. i build things. ideas, sites, applications, whatever it takes…. i think perhaps this leaves people with the impression that these projects are all i really care about. honestly, i believe that these projects are all that i am able to contribute to this community.
paranoia will destroy ya: ive said it before, im deeply paranoid. in the early days of #iranelection, many people were new to twitter, new to the concepts of url shortening, naive to the idea that bad people want to do bad things to innocent surfers. to try and help, i built a website to educate people about url shortening. as an application builder, ive tried to make people aware of the dangers of malicious twitter applications. i would say that as a whole, we have all become wiser about these issues. while this has been a burden as a developer trying to get people involved with other projects, i count this as a victory for education and web safety.
just nod if you can hear me: ive got over 950 followers…they follow me for a reason right? right? i’ve been fooling myself apparently. either people are scared, people are lazy, or nobody is listening. pray4iran has to beg for help every week, the first play4iran game was met with less than expected results, and the green october project has received suggestions from 16 people… according to my calculator, 16 out of 950 is less than 2% effective. its almost like talking to myself.
prolonging the magic: im gonna skip #10,000. @greenthumbnails is being retired. i am leaving the baggage behind and moving to a new account. i will try to put my next 10,000 posts to better use.
thank you for your support!