Twitter alert!

I had taken a personal oath that I wouldn’t participate in the current media hype revolving around the social networking site Twitter – news channels are airing primetime stories about it, academes with serious delusions about their own coolness are writing papers on it and the entry of celebrity Twitterers (Oprah been the latest celebrity member) has just skyrocketed registrations even further. The funny thing is most people who first join Twitter, have no idea what to do with it. I still don’t. I find it nowhere close to Facebook in the vast potential it has for wasting my time. I’ve gotta say though that I have this freakish tendency to register on these sites just a few weeks before they’re propelled to uncontrollable fame and just about everybody I might have wanted to avoid jumps on the bandwagon. It happened with Facebook too. So much for exclusivity. I think I’m just way too behind on the technology curve. Either I’m too cool to be geeky or not geeky enough to be cool.

Twitter has even done some people a whole lot of good. On March 2, 2008 Greg Rewis created Twitter history when he asked his girlfriend Stephanie Sullivan to marry him in a tweet. Apparently, the couple claims that Twitter is an integral part of their long distance relationship, after Flickr, Skype and what now seems to be becoming an increasingly extinct mode of online communication - email. I think the most attractive feature of tweeting is the fact that you have to encapsulate everything you want to say in 140 characters. Imagine how uncomplicated all relationships would be if people had to communicate within a prescribed word limit. With both approaching middle age and certainly having had their share of failed relationships, Stephanie and Greg have evidently discovered the new mantra for a modern healthy relationship – if you can’t say it in 140 characters or less, it’s better not said. I wonder though whether anybody has ever broken up with somebody over a tweet. It got me thinking about some of the things I personally would NOT like to read about in a tweet and I came up with this list –

1) Death of a loved one
2) Bitching about exes
3) Posting photos of that giant wart on your back
4) A seriously bad case of diarrhea
5) Menstrual cycles
6) Suicidal thoughts
7) Kinky sexual fantasies (especially if the tweet is from a sibling)

And if I have any faith in the inherent narcissism cultivated by chronic social networkers, I’m sure each of the above has been tweeted about and discussed in painful detail already. And speaking of inappropriate tweets, read about how Twitter can get you fired if you're not careful!