New way to avoid work

I’ve been so busy editing recently I’ve missed the time to blog. To anyone visiting, apologies.

I’ve also been occupied learning the art of tweeting, thanks to a friend of mine, Amanda at Tigerfish PR. (@AmandaTigerfish.) I can see it’s going to become addictive for me in much the same way as email. Less time to spend on writing, critiquing and editing perhaps, but it’s great to belong to a network of people with related interests, isn’t it. I’ve already learnt lots of useful stuff that I’d have otherwise missed; about a fire in a local restaurant I might have been patronising this weekend – not now, sadly ­– a link to a surprising if enjoyably vicious blog from a writer I know, news from a colleague and a very good in-joke for tennis fans.

Yes, there are some rubbishy tweets, the status reporters ‘just had breakfast’ and ‘went to the shops today’ that non-devotees scoff about. Some from intelligent people you wouldn’t expect it of, too, who are obviously addicted to sharing their every thought with their followers. Then there are others who series-tweet, that’s annoying; never mind the tweets that are so full of links it’s impossible to tell what they’re actually about. Oh rats, this has turned into a grumble, not what I intended. But the good stuff outweighs the bad by far, and if certain twitterers get on the nerves, that’s what the ‘Unfollow’ button’s for. By the way, I do like HooteSuite as a format for managing Twitter, it’s much easier to work with than Twitter itself and you can feed in streams from other social media networks too, for extra convenience.

To aid me in both my email and Twitter addiction, I’m going to bite the bullet and get a smartphone. But which one? Given my main use will be email, and I use POP3 accounts on my PC, I’ve been told the new BlackBerry Bold 9900 has my kind of smarts. It is super-fast for email, apparently, and condenses attachments to allow me to download them quickly. But loads of people recommend iPhone too. And you can play SkyGo on it, meaning I can watch tennis on the move…tempting. But apparently I’d have to install iTunes on my PC to get synchronicity, and I already have minor incompatibility problems with emails from Mac and iPhone users, so that’s a bit off-putting. Advice anyone?

Meanwhile, back to the editing. I’ll just check HootSuite first… @deawriter