What's with all the Twitter chatter?

Have you heard about Twitter? Can you answer in 140 characters or less?

After hearing about it for awhile, I decided to test drive Twitter. If you don't know what Twitter is, you are not alone -- although it appears that hundreds of thousands of folks are using it for fun and even for business.

The Twitter offering is pretty simple in concept. You sign up and then post an answer to the question "What are you doing?" as frequently or infrequently as you like. One catch: you have only 140 characters to do it. This is like blogging light -- somewhere between text messaging and blogging I guess. Once you sign up, you can easily twitter from your mobile device, too.

Your friends can "follow" your answers, called "tweets" by some, and you can choose to follow others. Some folks have hundreds of public followers while others choose to keep their tweets private.

I jumped in after hearing about it from several sources. I'm calling it a personal "beta test" although that is probably a misnomer. You can see my twittering at https://twitter.com/johnpdavid

So what are folks twittering about? That's where the rubber meets the road. There's some Seinfeldian stuff going down: twittering about nothing. A big part of the Twitter offering is that you stay in contact with your friends/followers by updating them on your life. "I'm at XYZ Bar until midnight" which suggests that your friends come by and throw one back with you. Or, "stuck in the carpool lane at the kid's school" which suggests that your friends should feel your pain.

I found that it offers me a quick outlet for those random thoughts I have which are so clever in my own mind. For example, I twittered the other day: "Trump just endorsed McCain on Larry King. Did either candidate ask for it?"

Now, I agree that this seems a bit inane on its face. Telling a bunch of people that you just brushed your teeth or that you are hungover or cheering for your favorite sports team. Who cares, right? That's one reason I'm beta testing.

On to the business side, reporters are twittering. I'm "following" CNN's Rick Sanchez. He twitters heavily in the hours preceding his show weekday afternoons, and it is pretty interesting stuff. Check him out at https://twitter.com/ricksanchezcnn

Other reporters and editors are doing the same. Some send out tweets looking for sources. Starts to make sense for a PR guy to be on Twitter when you consider that, right?

On the fun side, I've also found what appears to be a fake/false twitterer (Note to self: come up with a clever name for this). If you check out https://twitter.com/NancyGrace, you will probably come to the conclusion that it is written by someone caricaturing the CNN personality. Some of it is funny, but not entertaining enough to garner a huge "following."

Are you twittering? Let me know. Interested, follow me.

--John