So I've heard about Twitter, read about Twitter, but still have not figured out what all the hype about Twitter is about. Had Scott entitled his post about Twitter this week "Twitter", I probably never would have read it, instead he entitled it "Twitter: The usefulness of Micro-blogging", and I thought to myself, micro-blogging sounds interesting, let's have a read.

I wanted to try to define what Twitter is. This is something I've been struggling with for awhile (along with what can I use Twitter for). So far, the best I can come up with is a cross between IM and Text Messaging and Blogging. I say IM and Text Messaging because of the short messages in Twitter (140 characters) and the conversation style of the messages. The blogging part comes in because the posts on twitter are for all the world to see, with a key difference being that the Twitter service hosts all of the content.

So I have spent a couple of hours now looking at this Twitter thing, and I'm still not sure I understand it. I installed TinyTwitter on my phone and sent my second ever tweet. I tried installing Witty, but it's crashing on startup, so I'll need to look for another client. So I am making an effort to try this out at least. I think I will follow Scott's tweet feed for awhile and see what that brings.

One thing I'm not entirely comfortable with is the idea of sharing certain information with the world. Now of course I can control what I tweet, and I share information all the time, so let me try to qualify my statement with some examples.

Looking at what people tweet, I came up with some examples of stuff that I could tweet based on stuff I've done the past couple of weeks (I didn't count out 140 characters).

• Played UltraZone for the first time in many years with some old friends and had allot of fun
• Lost our play off game for roller hockey
• Just won another copy of Windows Vista for some comments I made during the UW EBC RFID workshop

I was actually kind of excited by the prospects of Twitter when I thought up these examples, but then a little paranoia set it. Since most people seem to tweet in near real time, and that makes the most sense, you could start to construct a pretty accurate picture of someone's day to day (hour to hour) activities. As I said, you can tweet whatever you want, and can just choose not to tweet something.  I don't think I have any stalkers out there, but you never know ;)

My twitter feed is www.twitter.com/asalvo and we'll see if I end up using it or not.