Twitter confession

As an avid Blogger, I have been carrying a slight feeling of guilt for a number of months about Twitter. Everyone else appears to have jumped on it and to be hooked. Snippets of valuable information are coming from Twitter and I was left wondering what I might be missing out on. Matchdays, in particular, seem to spark Twitter users (Twitterers?) into life, although so far this season I have either been at the match or listening to it, so I was left wondering why I needed additional comments on what I had just seen or heard.

I am not an early adopter of new technology although I love gadgets and work "in IT." It took me two years to discover that Blogger was a fairly intuitive, help-yourself service and not something that you needed programming skills to operate. However, the snowball that is twitter has been building so I actually bothered to have a proper look and jump in a couple of weeks ago. I thought I would start slowly by following only a couple of things, CAFC Official being top of the list.

For the first few days, it all went very well and I found I was effectively getting the components of the club's daily Bulletin email as they happened, rather than summarised at the end of the afternoon. More importantly, I got the message that there would be a second pitch inspection at Walsall at Midday and that the referee was confident the game would go ahead. I was impressed.

Then on Saturday, after the match was called off, I got a number of annoying Tweets telling me that the club's Twitterer, had forgotten his coat etc. Not quite so relevant. The volume of Twitter traffic from Charlton appears to be on the increase and yesterday I received a record (for me) of 29 Tweets yesterday on CAFC Official. A handful were contributions from fans but the majority from the club. There were one or two pictures of the snow covered pitch and covers; another told me the game was off and then there were a whole load that added nothing of any value - a close-up a Robin, news that his seven-a-side game that evening had been postponed, a calculation of the volume of snow on the pitch etc.

I appreciate that Tweets are limited to 140 characters and as such, several Tweets are often needed to relay a piece of information fully, but yesterday was not a good day for me and Twitter and I am left wondering whether or not to continue? Perhaps it was a one-off or maybe I should look for other Twitterers whose output and content more closely resembles what I am looking for?

I then wondered about how this works and who pays for it. I use my mobile for Twitter on the basis that I can get pretty much all the information I need if I am on-line. So I know that I will pay SMS charges for those Tweets I receive. No big problem at the moment as I have hundreds of spare text messages in my monthly deal. However, I am guessing that Twitter sites that generate large volumes of SMS messages - like CAFC Official - are valuable to the mobile companies. As such, they probably offer incentives to encourage traffic. If this is the case, then I can see an explosion in the volume of non-information that is pumped out and the value of Twitter will be lost, for me at least.

Am I right or am I missing something?