On May 22nd, 2007 at 5:35pm I posted my first Tweet. After fighting it for awhile and finally being convinced by my friend Gordon Brander (@gordonbrander) I decided to start using Twitter as a way to network. And thus began my experiment.

Now exactly 2 years and 4,757 updates later I have decided it’s time for my experiment to come to an end.

Like I said the only reason I decided to start using Twitter was to network. I made a goal that year to ramp up my networking efforts since I’m not much of an outgoing person. I was freelancing full time at that point and I wanted to see if I could use Twitter professionally. After two years I can say that although I have gleaned some professional value from Twitter it hasn’t been a good ROI in terms of how much time I’ve had to put into it.

Having said that I have met some really awesome people on/through Twitter and it functioned great as a public chatroom/office watercooler (as my friend Ben Lew, @n0s0ap pointed out). But, I feel it’s taking up too much of my time at this point and I feel there are better, more lasting ways to interact with friends as well as network.

I hope that my departure from Twitter doesn’t mean a departure from the friends I’ve made on Twitter. I hope to continue to stay in touch as best I can and I hope to do it in a more lasting and meaningful way. If you would like to connect outside of Twitter please feel free to contact me, or direct message me via Twitter and I’ll reply with contact information.

I’m going to be trying to keep up with my blog more often as well, so feel free to grab the feed.

A big thanks to all my friends on Twitter for their friendship.