To tweet or not to tweet? Twitter done me wrong

     

That's me on Twitter, as seen from this MacBook Air.

    After 2007 -- when Twitter became a popular form of cyber communication -- we journalists in the newspaper world were heartily encouraged to sign up.     

    Sign up, we did, en masse, as it was a great way to promote your stories to a wide online audience.

    I did this in 2009, as did many others in the newsroom. So it was kind of shocking a few weeks ago when Twitter suddenly disappeared from my six-month-old iPhone (although it still exists on my new Mac).  

    I had to restart it on the cell phone and Twitter now thinks I never existed.

    This is a pain. I had some 670 followers which had been built up over the years when I was a journalist. 

    How is one supposed to re-build? Should it even be tried?

    I have given myself a couple of weeks to think about this. It is still an app on the phone, but there is no profile picture and no followers. 

    Trying to think of adding anything approaching the hundreds I used to have is exhausting.

    According to an online search, Twitter was invented in 2006 by former Google employees. Current CEO Jack Dorsey was an engineer on the development team. As you'll recall, it was limited to 140 characters per post although that character-count was enlarged in later years.

    It became widely used starting in 2007.

    Firms that track such data report that Twitter was the fourth-most popular in the world for engagement, in 2018 but that dropped off in 2019. It rebounded by October of this year, probably because of all the political news, not to mention use of the platform by outgoing President Donald Trump and other notable politicians. 

    It is valued at about $40 billion.

    Should I stay or should I go? I'm probably going to stay. 

    It comes down to time, and attention to an online form of questionable communicative value.