Am I a twit?

Erm ... tweeter? Twitterer?

To my vast surprise I got an email today telling me someone had requested to follow my Twitter feed. I thought this was odd for a few reasons.

First, even though I know people read this blog, it still surprises me that anyone cares what I have to say. Maybe that's a bit strong - it surprises me that people take the time to read this blog.

I read a few blogs, and I think of it as watching TV (which is strange, because I don't actually watch TV. I don't even own a television). A few nights a week I tune in to my "stories" to see what's developed. Sometimes it's a flashback episode, sometimes it's a mythology episode, sometimes it's a clip show or a crossover show. Other times it's a show about nothing.

Incidentally, I think I've just revealed my whole TV-watching heritage in those last 2 sentences.

Anyway, the second reason I was so surprised is that I don't actually use Twitter. I tried for about an hour, and it was a disaster. I'm not really interested in knowing about people in real-time ... if it's important, it can wait, right?

One of my Twitter friend requests was from my dad, which is hilarious on a lot of levels. One of my stupid cousins in India threw a bunch of internet buzzwords at Dad and he came back to the States frothing at the mouth to join the 21st century. Within a week I think I got 8 invitations from him from software like Facebook (I am not on Facebook), MySpace (why do you need both?), LinkedIn (that one I joined awhile ago) ... and so on. When the Twitter invitation came, I felt obligated to point out to Dad that in 30 years he's never showed any interest in what his children were doing - why would he care about complete strangers? That conversation didn't go well.

It also seems to me that Twitter is meant to work by text messages, so of course you'd need an unlimited text messaging plan. Which I don't have now, although I suppose that might change once I'm back in the US.

Maybe I should give Twitter another try. After all, it's not like I have to read my own feed, or join any others.

Clearly I am not a candidate for the social networking revolution.

By the way, the (surely common) joke that's the title of the post I originally thought of a few months ago at a party. We were trying to figure out what to call someone who tweets, and eventually I came up with "twit."

I felt very witty. I mean twitty. ARGHGHRHGHRHR ....