With around 68 million visitors daily and more tweets now posted than there are people in the world, Twitter well and truly hit the mainstream during 2009. There are more ways than ever to update the service from a mobile phone, whether you’re kicking it old school with text updates or rocking the very latest Twitter app. Even Father Christmas is at it. This convenience sometimes makes us go a bit too far – live-tweeting a birth, death or marriage, for example, is a bit much. So where do you draw the line at Christmas?
Will you be live-tweeting the opening of your Christmas presents? Will you Twitpic your Christmas dinner? Maybe you’ll start a #festivecheeses hashtag, or post increasingly drunken Merry Christmas tweets throughout the day on Dec 25th?
It always feels a bit wrong firing up the computer on Christmas day, but most of us will keep our phones on to text and call family and close friends. I will. I can’t help myself; someone might want to wish me a Merry Christmas and how rude of me if I don’t reply straight away? But on Christmas day at least, perhaps we should be going Twitter cold-turkey.
No one really cares what you’re having for Christmas dinner. It’s Christmas Day, we’re all having Christmas dinner. It’s not really fair to whoever has slaved over the hot stove all morning to prepare Christmas Dinner if you’re intent on whipping out your phone to tweet about it (and then the obligatory checking for @replies every twenty seconds for the next half hour). Bragging about presents is one sure-fire way to get yourself unfollowed and those repeated Merry Christmas tweets are about as necessary as Tweeting ‘Good Morning’ every morning. The #festivecheeses hashtag is one I could probably get on board with, though.
Instead of obsessing about updating people you barely know, you should focus on having a jolly old time with your actual nearest and dearest who, chances are, you speak to less than your Twitter followers. So keep your phone on, by all means, but don’t let Twitter ruin Christmas for you or your family. And if you feel the urge to Tweet, perhaps suggest a game of charades instead.
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