twittering from the hospital

Had one of those nasty accidents on the way into work in late January. You know, the sort where you ask the Doctor if you'll be OK to make your meetings that afternoon, and he just gives a bit of a hollow laugh and says oh, I don't think so.

In the end I was taking painkillers in the hospital for three days, while the swelling around my wrist came down, with only a mobile phone (and various visitors) as my lifeline to the outside world. So I naturally twittered my way through hospital, and Loudtwitter, which at this point in time was shipping my tweets to my livejournal daily, propagated my twitters to my blog, keeping my friends up to date. Without my having to painfully call them all.

Unfortunately, I hadn't factored into my consideration the twitter-haters, my friends, the twitter haters. Not all of my friends, of course, but a significant minority of them, who loath twitter and enthusiastically share this fact with depressing frequency. A few weeks later, reading the umpteenth comment box rant pile-on about how stupid twitter is, I regretfully closed off my use of Loudtwitter. Lifeline it may have been, but it was not an elegant solution to the problem. Some people had liked it, but other people -- as had been the case when I first tried blogging by text message -- found it bewildering and infuriating. These are people who have chosen to communicate within a blog/journal environment, who do not appreciate communication by fragment, who do not enjoy the tiny bites of information that twitter delivers. It's not their mode. Forcing my twitters out of their native environment and into one that is journal-focussed was creating a jar, a communication difficulty.

So no more Loudtwitter for now. I'll have to come up with a new solution. And until then, not end up unexpectedly in hospital.