essays

About This Twitter Phenomenon....

twitter iconsI may be the last blogger in America to weigh in about Twitter.

There seems to be something about Twitter everywhere. Oprah began tweeting and garnered 34,000 followers in about a nanosecond.

It seems that everyone and their brother is into Twitter... so Twitter must be here to stay, right?

Maybe not.

A week or so ago I was ferrying Younger Daughter back to campus after a dental appointment. Younger Daughter is a college freshman and a noted Facebook stalker. Every now and then I like to amaze her with my entirely superficial and incomplete knowledge of popular culture; another time recently, for example, I surprised her by knowing about Lady Goo-Goo. Or Lady Gaga. (OK, I have since forgotten.)

Anyway, our conversation on this trip back to school had drifted to the topic of text messages. Younger Daughter told me that she shows my text messages to all her friends. She told me that all her friends find my text messages screamingly funny.

(Why? Well... I do silly, absurd things... like capitalizing the first letter in each sentence... and spelling words correctly... and using punctuation. Totally radical, I know, but that's the kind of wild and crazy guy I am.)

My daughter's statement about how much her friends like my text messages seemed like an opportunity for me to trot out another popular culture reference. So I answered, "Maybe I should set up a Twitter account. twitter treeI'd tweet my text messages to you and your friends could sign up to be followers."

An awkward silence followed.

"What?" my daughter asked, finally. "What's Twitter?"

I explained that it is a micro-blogging service... where people can advise of things that happen to them (in 140 characters or less) as many times a day as they want.

Younger Daughter was still silent.

"It's like changing your Facebook status, only people follow the changes on their cell phones."

"Oh. I see. It's so funny you know about Facebook status."

But not another word about Twitter.

If Younger Daughter doesn't think Tweeter is the greatest thing since indoor plumbing, I'd steer clear of any Twitter IPO... should there ever be one, that is.

Curmudgeon is a self-described dinosaur -- an Ozzie and Harriet person living in an Ozzy and Sharon world. And sometimes it confuses the heck out of him. He writes a very amusing blog at Second Effort.

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