Do you Tweet? Or are you annoyed by the gushing attention paid to faddish Twitter?
Don't be too quick to dismiss Twitter and the legions of Twits as passing silliness. Just like blogging before it, Twitter is quickly morphing from the exceedingly banal to the (sometimes) indispensable.
Twitter poses the question "What are you doing now?" and asks for an extremely brief response to be beamed to your "followers." At first, this prompted Twits to provide frequent updates of their participation in boring activities. Just like the first bloggers who famously (or apocryphally?) posted about what they had eaten for breakfast.
But (some) Twitter use has grown up -- providing eyewitness accounts from the scenes of breaking news stories or allowing a smart business executive to Tweet substantive yet casual updates of true interest to followers. And to spark debate among a virtual community on some topic of interest to them.
Like the Blackberry and the cell phone text message, Twitter is also forcing prolific note writers to get quickly to the point. And for that we can be thankful. Brevity rules.
- Jon Harmon
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