As you all know, I've been using twitter to announce new stuff added to Shira.net, dance-related "quote of the day", dance tips, and other dance-related stuff. Now that I've been doing it a while, I thought it might be interesting to share my impressions, as well as get updates from all of you on how your own thinking about twitter has changed since we last discussed it here.

I currently have 430 people following my tweets, so I guess I've managed to be interesting enough to attract and retain some followers. That's the challenge - coming up with 1 or 2 interesting dance-related things to tweet about every day.

I've been tweeting about my journey of learning Arabic with the Pimsleur audio CD set. It felt a little, uh creepy when I got a response to my first Pimsleur-related tweet, as though there was this giant corporation looking over my shoulder. I realize I could hide my tweets from them, and considered it, but then decided to let it be. And then they signed up to follow me. I pity the poor customer relations guy who had to dig through all my dance-related posts to find my tweets about their product. A perverse side of me prompted me to NOT mention the name "Pimsleur" in most of my tweets after that, so they wouldn't be able to do just do a computer search on their name and find them. Today I decided to post a cranky tweet about them complaining that I've finished their 30-lesson course and they don't have a next step available for me to take. Hey, if they're going to follow me, I may as well tell them (and everyone else) what I think of them!

There's this bot called EgyTweets that retweets EVERYTHING that anybody twitters about related to Egypt. Every time I mention Egypt in my tweets, they retweet it. Kind of odd, but I decided it's okay to let them do it. They DO provide a way to make them stop if you don't want them retweeting you.

There's also a LebTweets bot that retweets EVERYTHING that anybody tweets about related to Lebanon.

I found there was a twitter identity that was the name of a lyrics web site following me. I felt kind of unhappy that a web site that publishes lyrics was watching what I posted, because I was afraid they were trolling my tweets to find out when I might post new song translations and steal them. So I hid my tweets from them. I visited their site, and in searching it I'll admit I didn't see any evidence that they have stolen anything from mine, but other lyrics web site HAVE stolen my song translations in the past, so I don't have a lot of trust....

So, those are some of my dance-related experiences with twitter.

I'd love to hear what all of you are currently thinking about it!