The Question to which I am raising my hand is:

"Who has heard of twitter in passing several times but doesn't actually know what it is beyond some web thingy."

But they did encourage me to go and look at the website for the first time from where I dug up the following gem:

"Twitter puts you in control and becomes a modern antidote to information overload."

which when put next to the following says it all really:

"Eating soup? Research shows that moms want to know."

This lot must have been given far too much money for all the Bolivian marching powder they must be on to come up with this shit.

Paris, 'cos she probably knows them all.

And if I have to face a PHB for a job interview I cam say "According to Wikipedia, Twitter is..." (I need not finish the sentence as I have by then either won or lost the IT interview decisively, depending on whether the interviewer has an IQ above or below 103).

Seems to be some sort of web site you can send/receive group SMS messages from. Nice idea I guess for those who use SMS, but I think I will stick to IM since I am generally more accessible on that than on my Mobe^H^H^H^H MoPho anyway.

And I am usually more verbose that 140 chars.

And I have an opposable thumb (it opposes excessive work).

I cheerfully submit:

webborrhea - a more pronounceable form of Web2.0rhea(TM), which of course will soon be trademarked by Vulture Central.

bloggerel - Bogs, blogs, it's all the same bloggerel. A handy new synonym for BS.

enjoy,

Geoff

I can't believe Web20rhea and variants are still available.

I love the Reg and its jejune ways!

While I have the mic - I have the next Google/Facebook and would like to trade for a breakfast restaurant premises in Cupertino, CA (like there is another!)

I am khatchig

I am at cellbent dot you know the tld

I have a Twitter account but I rarely even look at it now because the SMS update to my phone doesn't work even though it's all set up. It worked for a bit and then stopped so I lost interest and moved on to other things. Perhaps if they fix it I'll go back.

I understand what Twitter is.... it's a web frontend to a private IRC server isn't it ? I bet it is...

IRC has been around forever, and with your own [free] IRC server and a natty [free] webclient, you and all your friends can have free group chats that aren't restricted to 140 characters (hell, even SMS is 160!).

But what do I know? IRC doesn't have a clever name like 'Twitter' and wasn't [re]invented last week by some spotty oik fresh out of MIT.

-Jar.

If they enforced haiku rules.

Empty tide roars

The Cloud darkens noble thought

Banality spreads

news.bb.co.uk ran a twitter-fan item this week (by you know who, i was disappointed), and news.google ran a big piece yesterday about the winner is twitter, best thing since last years winner - twitter. Because they used it to get to cool parties at SXSW. Wot??

My wife's experience of Twitter on the other hand, was setting it up at home one morning, and two hours later calling me frantically to go to the web site and de-activate it. Her secure work place internet wouldn't let her get to the site, and she was being in-un-dated with the mindless thoughts of the Twitter sphere, while for the following week all her friends were mailing her and asking her to take them off her Twitter invitation, that they didn't want to be part of anything that inane, or that they didn't have a clue what it was and could she explain why they were receiving these invitations from her. "It was a mistake" she would reply :-)

Thumbs-down. Though i suspect the kid's will like it, because they don't know any better.

... you can't spell "twitter" without "twit".

"MoPho" ... now there's an abbreviation I can get along with.

You can screw this "m*be", "l*ppy" (etc) malarkey, just keep your hands of my MoPho, mofo!

</off-topic>

Twitter? Sounds like a big bag-o'-wank to me.

http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter

wow, something more knee-jerk, stream-of-consciousness, and inane than a blog. probably worth noting that most people's thoughts are not worth sharing after sober reflection, and especially not worth sharing with Twitter immediacy.

the name seems appropriate, reminds me of birds singing in the trees: just as irrelevant, but the birds are more pleasant (unless one is trying to sleep), and potentially just as distracting.

where do i sign up to not have it?

And it says it all. Twitter is not for important stuff that is worthy of a mail or a phone call to people you care for (and, hopefully, who care for you).

No, Twitter is the place you go to to tell everyone who can possibly be interested that you're going to have lunch/a coffee/take a dump.

How charming to think that there are people who have enough time on their hands to alert others to all these little things in their lives. And there are others with nothing better to do than read it.

Thank goodness they did say that "real life is what happens between email and phone calls".

Not to mention inane babbling about nothing interesting at all.

For the life of me, I cannot fathom why it is so important to some people to "document" their lives on this kind of stupidity.

I'll pass.