I got quite active with Twitter in May of 2012. I had not been involved in what I like to call "The Gen World" with other researchers, prominent genealogy bloggers and some professionals prior to that - even though I have been doing family history research for quite a few years.

Now I don't have over 1,000 followers or do I follow that many - but I do follow most of the prominent genealogy bloggers.

At first, I found it a terrific way to find out what others are writing, and also a way for me to post links to my blog posts and hopefully make a few "real" connections.

And indeed that did happen - and Twitter became my "friend."

I used it a lot and enjoyed the short conversations and the access to others blog post links.  So it was a valuable 9 months or so of happy tweeting.

Someone related to me recently that none of the genealogy community that tweets owns Twitter and anyone can tweet about what they want. I actually agree with that statement.

But I have noticed lately that Twitter has become less and less useful to me for genealogy connecting. And this is why I think it has become less useful:

• Some people retweet everything and most people retweet nothing
• I was initially enamored of the #FF idea, but have seen less and less of these lately. I am not sure that the sentiment (which is a good thing) has not been overtaken by one's desire to get their mentions up to improve their Klout score.
• In looking at what gets retweeted (and not just mine), most genealogy related tweets rarely get retweeted over 3 or 4 times
• I have participated in several tweet chats and I find them a totally useless expenditure of an hour of my time. Most of been from Ancestry, a few from other genealogy "venues" and some totally unrelated to genealogy. It is my experience that they are like a "food fight."  It's hard to distinguish the macaroni and cheese in your face from the cherry pie. And it is even worse with all the food stuff on the wall. It seems that most recaps are edited by the originator of the chat so one does not actually get the entire flow and content of the chat
• I have found no "cousins" via Twitter, although I have via Facebook and Google+
• Even creating Twitter lists of my favorite tweeters has not reduced the amount of time scanning for something "good."
• There seems to be an increasing amount of tweeting of old posts and links.

The moral of the story is that I am using Twitter less and less.  Maybe that will change - but I doubt it.

Recently, Google launched Google+ Communities and Google+ became for me a very viable platform. More serious, more professional and more room to write and share (not to mention - integrated with Google search and the Google monolith.) Oh and by the way, in two short months, my Google+ referrals to my blog posts are triple those of Twitter according to analytics statistics. But more about Google+ in a future post.

In a word are you using Twitter "More" or "Less" and why?