To Twitter or Not to Twitter? That Is Today's Question

Years ago, I stumbled across a survey that mentioned business executive's key concern in life was not health, status, money or relationships, it was time. I believe them.

I personally wish we could move to a 100 hour metric day and fit the tonnes of stuff I'd like to get to on my B-pile. Heck, I may even think about a full 8 hours of sleep like most medical associations suggest (vs. the four I get now).

It's with that context in mind where I have hit a crossroads with Twitter - a clever microblogging service and darling of the social media early adopter set.  More than once this week, I feel like I've been profiled by my expert social media peers and have been found deficient given my lack of twittering. It's not surprising, I do the same with people who proudly abstain from Facebook. The difference - in the former case, it is a small cultish sect. In the latter case, it is a burgeoning  early majority 30% of the population.

Normally, I would gladly take up the novelty.  I have a My Space account.  I rarely use it but browse every so often. I travel around Squidoo, Wikipedia, You Tube, Second Life, delicious, Technorati and a number of other social media hot spots to stay fresh and satiate my curiosity. I'm a fairly profilic blogger - 3-4 long form posts a week here at Buzz Canuck and grazer of other blogs. I am a rabid Facebook user with a cadre of 3,000 influential friends, some very zealous Scrabbulous players and a number of group pages. I have recruited a 1% army - my attempt to corral the top business bloggers in the country and rally and profile them as a group. I'm on a number of conference committees and regularly do customized presentations at industry events, seminars and client offsites. I also try to make it out to industry events like Third Tuesday, Case Camp and others to turn online acquaintances into offline friends. I routinely waste free disposable time reading trend and marketing sites, active sport and fitness sites, local city blogs and various brand communities (Nike Plus is my latest fave). Purist as I am, I get The Globe and Mail and New York Times delivered to my house.  I pull together a monthly e-newsletter The Buzz Report which goes out to a few thousand Canadian professionals. Oh, and my day job - I run a word of mouth marketing group with thousands of influencers, many business partners and bevy of existing and prospective clients.  When you pile on a personal, social and active sporting life, my life seems pretty stretched but I'm not complaining.

And unfortunately, Twitter, for most users is an addiction and I'm not sure if I'm ready for that level of omni-connectedness.   The time commitment and chronic posting seems to be overcoming my need to get involved in this next shiny thing. Plus, although I think I lead a pretty interesting and manic  life, I don't know if people should care about  or know about the fact that I'm picking up a non-fat grand latte at my local Starbucks after I write this post.

Beyond Twitter's invasiveness, for good and bad, when is there just a point, when you're too social?  New colleague and smart guy Dave Fleet mused about this on his blog recently and the rising cresendo of new social media tools he is into. At some point his graph (visualized) has to level off.

So what does everybody think, do I set up a nest and let Twitter hatch or do you think I may be Twittering some of my only valuable downtime away?