Now that I’ve summarized my Twitter experience into 10 learning points, I’d like to share in a more open form way what the year was like.
I started out wondering what Twitter was and I have to tell you nothing helped. The word status was unhelpful if not harmful as a diving board. It meant talk about yourself. All about yourself. So I went on vacation and posted a ton of photographs to share. I uploaded photos of food. Talked about breakfast. The weather.
Then, I noticed people were talking about causes so I barked about my causes. People loved quotes so I found a bunch of quotes (most of which I realize now have been circulated among Tweeps a gazillion times). Once, I was really into a contest and a set about hashing their brand as many times as I could to get into the drawing.
Then I noticed few were following me and discovered my account had been compromised so the few people who were following me received a barrage of dm slime in my name. And, I found myself lost in Twitter’s Find People search engine.
Closed the account and started over not once or twice but three times.
I started to look for ways to find followers since I had few and the more of that I did led me down the road of more spam and phishing schemes. So let’s say in my case, fingers crossed, the third time’s a charm.
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I have some friends who have stayed with me through the trials of Twitter. Why I stuck with it I don’t know except I had a feeling there was a way to break the veneer and to stop feeling like a voice in the wilderness. No one talked to me. Twitter felt lonely. Is this all there is?
But the third time I opened my account, culled together my great few followers to ask them to bear with me and refollow me again. The third time I started to understand.
Twitter wasn’t about me jumping into the middle of a moveable feast. ‘Hey! Everyone come running, I’m here, aren’t I interesting, etc etc.’ This time I paid attention to my followers, read what they read, learned why I liked them, posted to their interests and then shared some additional of my own. I learned to think of tweets as living voices of real people and not simply text line status posts.
I constructed groups to better understand how people interrelated and I used Twitalyzer and Klout not because I wanted to be an influencer or have clout but because it was a dynamic way to understand statistically the results of my attempts to reach out.
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If I were to suggest something to people new to Twitter, I’d suggest slow-going. Follow a few people who you know and examine their lists of followers. Read and listen. Add the to conversation. Despite the feeling everything happens in a place you can’t see … you can see. The avatars are real people. They are the smiling faces of the friends you met and made.
They are helpful, open, encouraging, funny, serious, issue oriented. Their quotes have meaning, their page references are resources. It’s a world based on hand to hand help. It’s a communal linking. Hear that choir? 
Amazing. At least my Twitter world is. But I had to work at it. And the work was worth everything. And I still post vacation pics, talk about food, and find interesting quotes.