the twitter diaries – imogen lloyd webber & georgie thompson

The Twitter Diaries

Seeing as Twitter has been around for almost 6 years now, I guess it is hardly surprising to find a book almost entirely composed of tweets between two people.  In fact, it is probably more of a surprise that it has taken this long – although I am not altogether sure that it’s the first…it is just the first that I have come across!

The Twitter Diaries begins on New Year’s Eve when a society party in New York held by Peter Mignon enables is the setting for a meeting of 30-something Brits Stella Cavill (wannabe shoe designer to the stars) and Tuesday Fields (sports reporter).

When Tuesday returns home to London, they start tweeting regularly as @StellaCavill and @TuesdayFields (the book was released on 21^st May, and the accounts have been active since then).

Over the next 365 days, they talk about everything – love, life, their careers, family and pop culture.

This should be totally up my street – I am an avid tweeter after all (22,000 and counting!) and in the main, it was fun, light, frothy stuff.

However, there were a few little niggles I had.  Eg:  EVERYTHING was done by Direct Message…so in theory, not exactly tweeting.  And considering it was all done by DM, there were a fair amount of Retweets (RT) going on, which you can’t do within a DM.  It would just be a standard cut and paste.

Also, there was a lot of stuff about existing tweeting brands, which (as I am not a celeb-follower or a brand guru, I didn’t particularly get).  There was also a lot made of a twitter feud between Peter Mignon (@PM_TV) and @LordTw1tter which I assume is Piers Morgan and Lord Sugar – especially as the authors were introduced to each other by Piers Morgan!  (And yes, if you were wondering from one of the authors’ names, she IS his daughter!)

As I said – light, frothy and very ‘now’…especially as the year it’s set in I believe is 2012, and we’re not even halfway through it yet.

This isn’t a new idea by any means.  I remember the small trilogy Chat, Connect and Crash by Nan Mccarthy that came out in 1998 about two people who had met in a chat room, and then of course there are countless email-based books – probably one of my early favourites was E by Matt Beaumont in 2000.

But this is an enjoyable enough summer read, that you could speed through in hardly any time at all – and then follow the main characters on Twitter!