Twitter and Reverse Shyness

Today, I made myself a Twitter account. Finally, I'd add. It's more than half a year ago that Michiel and I opened a Twitter account for Wee Free Studio and it took quite a while for me to actually start using that account. Before that, Michiel sent out our tweets.

So what's the big deal about that? Well, I have a sort of reverse shyness. I'm almost never shy when I'm talking face to face to people, I'm quite shy when talking on the phone (even to people I know well) and I'm very shy when it comes to written communication*. Thus using Twitter causes me a great deal of discomfort (as does writing emails to people I don't know very well, replying to thing in a public forum or a comments section, etc.). I have no idea why.

But the thing is that we do have to go out there if we want to be noticed. This is true for any online business, but even more so for indie game developers. People who are interested in indie games, especially those looking for the next new thing, are often also very much interested in the people behind those games. So we have to let the interwebs know who we are. And I can't leave that just to Michiel.

That's one good reason for me to start a twitter account. The other one is much more practical. The tweets I've sent through @weefreestudio were often of the form "I wrote a blog post!" plus a link. But this both feels weird and is confusing, since Wee Free Studio is two people and not just one. So I looked around and found that @Vlambeer does this in an elegant and logical way. As far as I've seen, they never use "I" or "me" in their tweets, but instead always refer to their personal twitter accounts.

Two good reasons for a personal twitter account, but still that reverse shyness to overcome. Luckily, even the very few posts I made through @weefreestudio were enough to convince me that I'd actually use the account after I created it. (What also helps is writing these blog posts, which is also getting easier with time... Could it be that practice does actually make perfect?) So I went and created my own Twitter account: @Fuddleclutch.

Fuddleclutch, by the way, was my Gnomish warlock engineer in WoW, back when I still played. Although I later deleted him to roll a Death Knight. Technically this was due to the character limit per server, but I thought it was also a fitting way to create a Death Knight. I always liked the name, and it stuck as my go-to name when my usual online aliases are unavailable (which was the case for Twitter).

Anyway, I guess I'll send out a tweet now about how I wrote a blog post about tweeting :).

-Willem-

*As far as I can tell, most people are shy the other way around; more reluctant to speak to people in real life than to write stuff online. That's why I dub this reverse shyness. But perhaps I'm looking at this the wrong way. If so, be sure to let me know via @Fuddleclutch ;).