Oh the twitteration

I'm sure all of you have heard of twitter. If not, I guess Wikipedia will tell you more. Basically, for those of you who don't want to follow the links, it is a way of sending a status message to people who are following you. Remember status messages? They started off on Instant Messaging clients, and worked their way out from there. Even on IM clients, status messages were initially a way of saying, I'm not here or something equally innocuous. They soon became messages on how you were feeling and what you were doing. This trend soon spread. Forum status messages, MySpace, FaceBook. They all had status messages. Then came twitter.

FaceBook, MySpace, and LiveJournal made status messages a viable messaging format for many people. Status messages have become a way to add context to a person's actions. FaceBook status messages have been used in court cases to throw the case out, or to get the punishment increased.

Twitter enables and facilitates what is known as microblogging. It's like blogging on speed. Or blogging hors d'oevres. Small bites abut lots of them.

But I tried very hard to stay away from it. Twitter, and it's partner word tweeting was not for me. I prefer to write blogs. Of course, there have been many people who asked me, why are you not on twitter? That way we can know where you are and what you're doing.

For many of them I would use an illustration. I talk about what tweets could be like. And once, during one of the training sessions, I used Chanux's twitter account to prove it.

I need to shit

I'm in the bathroom

*urrrrggghhh*

*plop*

*ploplop*

*thbpthbpthbrrrrt

That was a shit of truly epic proportions.

It's fucking huge!

*flush*

You get the idea.

But twitter has its advantages. When I was in an accident, Chanux and Seejay were updating people about me using twitter. So they were very happy to hear that I would be on twitter. After all they were pushing me to get on the bandwagon for a while now.

But then one day Seejay told me something interesting. He was wondering if he could get updates on when my blog was updated using twitter. Now that was an interesting idea. Very interesting. After all, this blog is on Kottu and Feedburner. The goal is to make it easier for people to hear me screaming and shouting. So I went looking for a solution and found twitterfeed.

So now I'm on twitter. If you start following me, you can start getting updates on your twitter. But please be warned, I don't twitter. So all you'll get are updates from my blog feed, and I probably won't be reading anything that you send me via twitter.

tweet