A day in a tweeter's life
CERITALAH By KARIM RASLAN

It sounds crazy but trust me when I say there’s something slightly compelling about tweeting. It is random and fun - dropping in short comments about whatever you're doing, the weather, the food and the scenery.

I have been tweeting now for the past two weeks or so. You can follow me on @karimraslan. I have 310 followers so far and many are from Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore. At the same time, my tweets are also linked to my Facebook account where all my columns are posted.

Because I’m always travelling, it’s an interesting way of keeping in touch. I follow many of the younger leaders such as Nurul Izzah, Tony Pua, Khairy Jamaluddin, Nik Nazmi and Rahman Dahlan.

Nurul Izzah always asks me to ceritalah, Tony keeps on “LOL-ing” and Khairy is very health-conscious (he was with the Territorial Army all weekend).

During the Parliament session, these younger (and cooler) MP’s are actually debating with one another through tweets. It’s fascinating stuff and is a relief after too much of Zahrain Hashim and Zul Noordin.

I have also been following Tengku Razaleigh, Lim Kit Siang, the PM Najib Tun Razak and Anwar Ibrahim. There are a lot of people tweeting; age is no barrier to it.

But for me, the best thing is all these young readers have contacted me through tweeting (and Facebook). I have some English language TESL teachers as followers, including one young lady from a small kampung seven hours overland from Kota Kinabalu. Imagine that: seven hours.

She says you can take a small boat to Indonesia’s Kalimantan from her kampung. She even sent me some photos of her school. I replied that she and her colleagues were real Malaysian heroes and I would like to visit her school one day. We need every English language teacher we can get in this country these days.

So what is a tweet? Well, it’s a short message (just 140 characters, not words, characters) sent to the people who are following you. It just happens that I tweet in a combination of English, Malay and Indonesian.

It sounds crazy but trust me when I say there’s something slightly compelling about tweeting. It is random and it is fun – dropping in short comments about whatever you’re doing – the weather, the food and the scenery.

It’s also extremely useful in spreading information. Indeed, the White House tweeted the news that Obama was postponing his visit to Indonesia even before they issued a press statement. After all, it was estimated (as of January 2010) that there were some 75 million Twitter users worldwide, sending some 500 million tweets a day.

Speaking of Obama, I’ve also been following RCTI news producer and anchor Putra Nababan who interviewed the US President in Washington DC last week. We bantered with one another as he walked along the famous National Mall there. Given that his TV news show (Seputar Indonesia) is watched by around 30 million people – more than Malaysia’s population and he has quite a few more followers than me! So does another mutual friend of ours, Gus Dur’s daughter, Yenny Wahid.

You can also “re-tweet” and send out information. The Iranian opposition used it a lot last year during their elections.

Tweeting is a powerful tool to mobilise people and will definitely play an important role in our next general election.

Indeed, on Sunday night as the MCA election was being concluded, I received updates from tweets and learnt of Dr Chua Soi Lek’s victory in the same way. CNN, BBC and other news websites even tweet extensively now in order to compete.

Last week when I was on a trip to Pekanbaru for work, I tweeted throughout the journey and I’ll be doing this as I continue my travels across Indonesia and the rest of South-East Asia so my followers will get to hear everything first.

So what was I tweeting about? I started with the songs playing on the radio – Bunga Cinta Lestari’s song, Karena Ku Cinta Kau.

I tweeted about the Balinese Hindu festival Ngepi, a national holiday in Indonesia which made Soekarno-Hatta airport very empty. Normally I would write down such observations in my trusty notebooks, but Twitter seemed just as handy as well.

By now, I was already getting hooked and it was a slight struggle to turn off my Blackberry as I boarded the Garuda jet. Thankfully, the flight was short. On landing in Pekanbaru, out popped the faithful Blackberry and I was back to tweeting.

Pekanbaru became my next subject. I described its broad, neatly swept streets and boulevards.

Often, I’d send out lots of individual but inter-connected tweets about the city, the province of Riau and the local economy. By the way, if you do go to Pekanbaru make sure you try the ikan patin. It’s very good.

Given that the maximum length of a tweet is 140 characters – managing the message is critical. But whilst it sounds short, it isn’t in reality.

Still, the limitation also has its benefits. It means you have to be economic – almost poetic – in your use of language. Indeed, a tweet at its best is somewhat akin to the Japanese poem, the haiku (or the pantun). Both are slight, open-ended and thought-provoking.

Having said that, I find I cannot work with abbreviations. I’ve been trained by decades of column-writing to write complete sentences.

I guess one of my younger followers is right, I am ‘ancient’.

As I returned home to Jakarta and finally laid my Blackberry to rest, I sent out a good night tweet, saying that I had my share for the day. Moments later, I received an ominous reply tweet from Khairy, “Oh, it’s just begun my friend. Twitter is Hotel California.”

With that I fell asleep...

(Source: The Star)