Well goodness me it’s already February. January went by very fast indeed, and it turns out I managed my January challenge (no Twitter) very well.

I uninstalled my Twitter clients (Tweetdeck for Chrome and Tweakdeck on my Android phone). I didn’t log into them at all. I was still authenticated with Twitter on the website* and visited twitter.com a couple of times to check something. No interaction, discussion or link saving, though.

So I’d say it was a big success. I did miss the interaction quite a bit – I missed the community of friends and colleagues (especially the SAP community) who have a big presence there. I missed the interaction and the sometimes thought provoking discussions. But on the flip side, I did read a lot more; in other words, I used the time that I might otherwise be staring blurry-eyed at the columns of tweets, and read a lot of stuff I’d Instapaper‘d. It was great.

In the latter half of the month I’d more or less forgotten about Twitter and had got to grips with Google+. It’s still no replacement for Twitter (mostly because of the people) but it’s a great platform — indeed, a social backplane — and I’ll continue to spend more time there.

• until this morning, oddly enough, when I got an email to say that Twitter had reset my password. Odd.

I know the idea of the 30 day challenges was not to attempt a full year of “no this, no that”; rather, there are some “do more of this, start doing that” elements too. But for February I’m attempting to drink no beer. That will indeed be a challenge, as I’m a big fan of craft beer, as many people know. It’s not that I’m avoiding alcohol altogether; I’ll allow myself a glass of wine here, a dram of whiskey there. It’s the beer that will be absent. As I drove out of work last night I’d mentioned to the inimitable Jamal Walsh that I was embarking on this challenge, and having just finished his dry January. gave me a tag-team style high five. Wish me luck!