Flittering with Twitter

Cartoon by Krishna M. Sadasivam (PC Weenies)

Tweet, tweet, tweet.

No, it isn't the sound of birds chirping ... but rather Twitter! In the last few days it seems that everywhere I turn I am hearing about all things Twitter. Kudos to their marketing team. I turn on CNN and the anchors are discussing the explosion of the use of Twitter and their own accounts. On The Ellen Show P. Diddy sat in the guest chair, Blackberry in hand explaining the fine art of TwitterBerry to a befuddled Ellen. Why wouldn't you just call? You can now use Tweeter to post tweets on Facebook. A news report featured a story about congregations tweeting during church services. They gave impassioned testimonials on how tweeting their impressions, thoughts and comments to their followers enriched their church experience exponentially. President Obama has a Twitter account and apparently Washington has become the Twitter capital of the USA.

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service.
It enables its users to send and read other users' updates
(known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up
to 140 characters in length. Wikipedia

There seems to be an enthusiastic population wanting to share their abbreviated thoughts and impulses (140 characters or less) with, in may cases, a hungry audience of unknowns. Yes, I have a Twitter account and I have it mainly to keep up to snuff with social media for my job. I have a backlog of 40 people - none who I know - requesting permission to follow me. My posts have ranged from the mundane to the radical- political rants that I am not sure I am comfortable sharing with the general populous. Does that mean I am not transparent? Maybe. I think I will create a work-only Twitter account.

I am not comfortable in having my worlds collide. I squirm to think that someone could search on my email and know so much about me. I am always awestruck when I visit blogs that boast a lengthy list of social media outlets, or their communities -- follow me on: Twitter, digg, Facebook, MySpace, Profilactic, del.icio.us, Flickr, LinkedIn and Plurk. I can learn everything about them - even see the photos they took or like. Not sure how relevant this all this.

I just pulled up Twitterfall to see the latest 'tweets' cascading from the top of the page in near-real time. Lots of people are watching American Idol ... heavy sigh Did I need to know that? Do I care? Someone does. And do I need to have people caring about what I am doing, thinking, liking, who I am associating with, and what I have or have not accomplished ...

This has turned into a full out rant of sorts. Luckily I have contained it here ... I needed more than 140 characters. My tweet may have looked like this: Twitter is everywhere; not sure why?