TGIM - Twitter

Okay, I know what you're thinking.

a) Who cares?

b) Isn't it the same as facebook?

c) "What are you doing? What kind of question is that? I mean seriously, who cares what anyone is doing?

I don't know why I started using twitter. I really don't. I signed up, started posting, and now I just do it. People asked what it was and I said, "Instant message blogging." I have very few local friends on there, and my phone is a dumb phone (whose contract ends tomorrow - suck it Verizon!) so I don't get live updates from anyone. I only use it when I'm on the computer, and until recently I'd only checked a handful of recent posts when I logged on to update my own and then went about my day. It's mainly just a way of keeping myself entertained in 140 characters or less.

But the other day I downloaded Tweetie. I've played around with one other twitter app, but it didn't take as I spent too much time reading old posts in an effort to have them all read (like email). For whatever reason, Tweetie is working for me and I've been getting some great links. Art from @jeffwamester, random awesomeness from @briandenham, swine flu updates from @CBcebulski, random depravity from @mattfraction, and all sorts of productivity and business advice from @tferriss. There are tons more, but that's just a random sample.

I mainly use it to stay connected to the comics community, even though I rarely talk comics (or much of anything but random thoughts on paper). I do have 2 goals specific to the medium though. Twitter-exclusive fiction (idea courtesy of @RantzHoseley) and the infamous Day of Twitter, in which every single thing I do will be twittered (tweeted, whatever).

I'm not such a fan of memes in the more modern less Dawkins-based idea of the word. I don't want to spend all day watching stupid videos. But I do enjoy experiencing things I'm not at via pictures and videos, especially if they relate to the experiences of friends and colleagues. And I'm not about to go searching through facebook to stalk people's photos so I can make sense of a status message. And I don't really care what celebrities are on here. I follow a couple of characters from The Office as they rarely post, but Oprah, Ashton Kutcher and Shaq can go disappear in another corner of the Internet.

So twitter gets the TGIM because... um, it allows you to experience cool in as broad or as narrow a scope as you'd like. As of this posting, I'm following 189 people, with 303 followers. I've updated 1,666 times. I'm about to email an artist whose work I just saw because he intrigues me. And @topcow told me that the Trader Joe's in Westwood validates after 6pm, so now I know I can go there and pick up women without worrying about paying for parking. There are worse things to be happy about.

Also, follow @melcaylo!