That’s Twitter for you. Or so I thought…

Long term and very observant readers may have noticed a brief and unsuccessful experiment with Twitter some months ago, where I thought creating an intelligent (i.e. authored rather than automatic) case law feed would be helpful. There aren’t enough cases coming out to make it worthwhile, and the automatic feeds actually seem to work very well indeed.

I started to revisit this when I recently discovered that I can automatically create Twitter feed from posts that I write. I am also very aware that I am not always able to maintain a steady stream of posts as (a) there isn’t always comment-worthy material and (b) I don”t always have the time – I’ve been unusually busy recently and working a lot of evenings and weekends (didums!). I thought some very short (no more than 140 characters, for those unfamiliar with this odd world) updates via Twitter would help to fill gaps and provide up to date content to the site.

On dipping my toes more fully into the world of Twitter, I have discovered that there are some real nutcases out there who appear to devote their lives to writing Twitter feed on immigration and asylum issues. It is a very good way to keep abreast of what is going on, if knowing about things instantly is something you consider desirable rather than deeply worrying and preferably to be avoided.

I have very slowly started to learn some of the lingo. I felt very proud when I downloaded a Twitter client to my phone (Twitterific, it’s free) and re-Tweeted for the first time. Then I felt a little foolish, I’ll admit. I’m not going to go into further details, but the Twitter feed on the right is probably now here to stay, and you will regularly find information there from other Twitter users which I think might be of interest to Free Movement readers and have re-Tweeted. These are marked with the customary ‘RT’ at the start. I will also be using the Twitter feed if I hear something while out and about and am unable to blog properly.

If you are a Twitter user (I suspect not) and know of any potentially useful and relevant Twitter feeds, do let me know. In the meantime, I’ll be relying mainly on NCADC and Migrants Rights Network, who are adept at picking out noteworthy news stories and other information. Asylum Aid, JCWI, Times Law Reports, Liberty Central at The Guardian, Amnesty UK and many others also have Twitter feed of varying degrees of frequency which I will re-Tweet where appropriate.