Once again, the people have presented me with something that I can’t live without anymore. A member one day asked the forums if anybody was using twitter, and his answers must have disappointed him lots. There were both sides of the spectrum.

What the hell is twitter?

Right down to:

FAG!

I was mostly confused about this new thing, so I decided to check it out. At first, the layout of the site and the crap and chinese characters that were displayed across the page. I still didn’t get it. Then, I decided to actually read what was written. Then, I clicked. But what kind of turbogeek would want to update something at least once a day just to tell the web what he was doing? Who stayed in front of his computer enough to get an occasion to update this?

Me.  And thousands of other people. After 45 or so updates and about 1 and a half months of active twittering (do the math, that’s about once a day), I’m hooked, and I don’t even know why. There something so… so sexy about this service. I don’t know, I just feel like it’s my duty as citizen of the internetz to update this thing at least once a day, two if possible. That’s what I call brainless social networking.

So yeah, i’s the new craze, but how does it work? Well first you register. If you’ve been on the internet for 3 weeks or more, I’ll consider that done. Then, you complete your profile and tweak your page a little, like any good social networker would, and then you go ahead and update the damn thing. There are 3 ways that you can update it: from the web interface @ twitter.com, from IM (they aren’t very descriptive on which clients are support, I know for a fact Jabber is), and the BIG feature of this service, the ability to update you account via SMS.

I don’t know whats going on at your place, but here, SMS is the big communication hype. Voice now seems to be obsolete, and texting has become a cheaper and faster way of communicating on the go. Almost every teenage person here is either texting right now or strongly considering the purchase of a cell phone to do just that.

Imagine what  you can do with your cell and Twitter. You’re at a friends, waiting for a party to lift off only half of the people are there, so you whip out your cell and do a quick update, among the lines of “At a party, I’m gonna guzzle like a sailor.”. Or even better, you just finished a 10 hour shift at work and have an assful of it; what better then to let the internet know? Un-sheath your cell and dump your shitload on the tubes!

I also have found that it serves  as break between hard hours of work at your computer. Not only do you get to tell everybody what your doing, but you can also find creative and artistic ways of saying it too. I don’t know for you, but after 2 hours of biology work, finding the correct wording to express my current occupations is relaxing. Think myspace-blogging, but light, with a 140 character limit.

So yeah, it’s totally useless and unpractical, but it’s the new hype and it’s fun, so give it a try. Not many people update it very often, or at least not for long, but just like Febreeze, those who like it like it a lot. Definitely worth some attention.