UPDATE: Even though I've left twitter, Mendicant University has not. You should follow @mendicant_news if you want to keep track of the day to day happenings at MU.

I'm sure I'll cave in and go back to old habits within a week or so, but for now I've decided to quit using twitter.

I haven't deleted my accounts because I don't want to have to rebuild my social network if I do go back at some point, and also because I want to keep them around for archival reasons. I want to experiment with more slow-cooked communications, and with making deeper connections to the people I interact with. I already have the Mendicant University alumni network and the Ruby Mendicant supporter network for discussing things with people who are interested in my work or working on projects with me. I plan to use those more often now. I will also blog here more often, so perhaps that's a positive side effect.

But I suppose I will need at least *some* replacement for twitter, and for that reason, I've created the #seacreature channel on Freenode. It is currently public with everyone having voice, but I may change that later if I feel like it. I will also of course frequent existing public channels for projects, but this is the channel I will use to post random links, engage in random discussions, and also hopefully, allow my friends to meet each other and have some cross-pollination of ideas happen. For more focused Ruby discussion, I'll probably use the public #rmu channel, so that our students can benefit from those conversations, but we'll see how it goes.

Yep, this sucks even more than two twitter accounts. But we'll see how it goes.