Twitter tackles the story of your life in 140 characters

By Esther Schindler

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My spouse and I recently had a restaurant dinner after a long day, and quietly (having temporarily run out of anything to say to one another) lurked on the conversation at the next table. Our ears perked up: the two people, the next table over, were talking knowledgeably about something that interested us.

You've had that experience, I'm sure. Sometimes, you don't want to "be social" in the sense of actively saying something deep and pithy; but you'd like to listen to people who care about the same things you do.

Using Twitter is like hanging out in a very cool restaurant that's frequented by interesting people. In this case, you decide who'll sit at the next table. Twitter can be as time-consuming as you want, since you decide how many tables you want to lurk on.

Now that you have selected a high-speed Internet connection, getting started with Twitter is incredibly easy. Sign up at twitter.com with a user name, as well as (ideally, really) your real name and a useful description. Include your URL if you like. That's about it. The entirety of the site content is based on you filling in a text field to answer "What are you doing?" with a hard limit of 140 characters. It's amazing how much you can say in 140 characters when you need to.

From there on, Twitter is about what you write in a "tweet" -- anything from "finishing a quilt" to "Yay! Diamondbacks won!" to "wrote my first blog." Your entries are like a mini-diary, collecting your experiences in as much depth as you care to share.

But Twitter isn't just a private journal. It's also about what is said by the people you follow and, optionally, about how you respond to them.

Finding people to follow is an entertaining challenge. You can begin by inviting people from your e-mail address book (some of whom are surely members), by typing a phrase of interest into the search field (i.e. "quilting") to find people with those interests, and by peeking at connections from the people you already follow. Click on "Follow;" your Twitter page will show you everything they write. The people whom you follow may or may not follow you; that's okay. They don't have to want to lurk on your conversation in the restaurant.

To respond to someone's message, you just type an "at" sign (@) in front of their userid. That is, to respond to my tweet, "I just bought a second PC," you could type "@estherschindler, Here's how to connect it to your home network." If I follow you, I'll see the reply, and we might start a conversation. And a stranger who follows you, not me, can click on the @estherschindler to see what I've written; if he likes my tweets, he can click on Follow, too.

Like I said: really easy. Really addictive. At this writing, with no particular effort I'm following over 200 people and 300 people are following me.

I like the idea of "following" people. It's less of a fake thing than someone "friending" me on other social networks, when we are complete strangers. Plus, Twitter lets me feel attached to and  up-to-date with people who are friends (or at least friendly acquaintances): hey, Tim's in Seattle this week, and Al went to the baseball game.

If Twitter were nothing more than an extremely popular Web site, it'd still be a great tool. But it's still a web page that you have to reload to see what's been added or changed. As a result, there are loads of add-ons: everything from sites like quotably.com and summize.com to track Twitter conversations to standalone applications like Twirl that automatically refresh your Twitter updates. An exhaustive (but possibly incomplete) list is at http://twitter.pbwiki.com/ -- and once you explore the site, you'll see why all those add-ons are necessary: because it's really, really hard to walk away from Twitter.