Divide by Null - undefined

There's a new sort of craze going round. That's Twitter. People send updates to twitter and that's received by other people. It's simple enough. So what's the big deal?

Twitter is a site full of everyone's thoughts. One can send a message simply relaying their status, location, desires, or general thoughts and anyone who wants to know will get it. So who would want to do it? A lot of people. Looking at my MySpace bulletin list, at least 50% of these bulletins are about how their day was, how bored they are, or just because they felt like letting people know something completely random.

People tend to be very nosy, always wanting to know what other people are doing. Some people are also the reverse, wanting to let everyone know how their life is right then. Twitter has an advantage over IM in that it's a many-to-many sort of communication. All the talkative people can let the nosy people know what their doing with a single message. Twitter is also designed for this sort of thing, "away" (status) messages for IM can be utilized as such, as well as MySpace bulletins, though that's not exactly their primary functions.

Stalker-ish? A little. This isn't really something that private or reserved people would use so much. But then, the same can be said for MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, and the dozens of other social networking sites. Twitter is social too, but in a much simpler way. There's also an option to make your updates available to friends only, but your friends might really be stalkers too.

A big time waste? Perhaps, but it only takes 5 seconds to update, which can be done by web, IM, or text. The latter also makes twitter more mobile being able to update without having internet access and receive others' updates similarly. Twitter can also be used in more constuctive ways, for example, to update others in a group collaborating on a single project, as a vacation log to your family, to say when you're doing something then track how long it actually to you to start, or such.

So what's Twitter to me? It's where I send messages that are too insignificant to start a conversation with, or not big enough to blog/bulletin. It's a place to complain or exclaim. It's "microblogging". It's nothing important, just a little added entertainment (distraction).

Why not try it? And for those interested, here's my twitter.