One of the best things about living in the mid-west is that it is so incredibly simple to stay on the bleeding edge of technology. The hard part is often dragging a bunch of friends with me so that I'm not lonely out there. Of course, then I suddenly have more friends on MyFriendDegrees than in real life, and its no longer the edge, let alone bleeding.
But I digress.
My point is that St. Louis is a great place to be a lazy trend-setter. All you have to do is read some press from the Coasts, check in with Chicago people every once in a while, and keep a vague eye on what's cool in London and Berlin. Then hit the bong a couple dozen times and forget all that. Follow this by siting on your ass for six months until you feel like just can't avoid work any longer, and then hope the URL suddenly springs unbidden into your consciousness.
This is approximately the story of how I started using Twitter last weekend. All the tech-toy cool kids out on the Left Coast have been using it for months, talking about how it makes them feel connected even when they can't see friends for months at a time. My initial reaction was envy; I often wish I could not see my friends for months at a time. I even spared a moment of jealousy for the bong hits those hippies must have been doing.
The Master Plan behind Twitter is to give your friends, associates, digital stalkers and illicit love interests an easy way to keep up with what you're doing. At first glance it seemed like it would have to be a huge pain in the ass in both directions. First, who the hell would bother to keep it updated. Second, who's going to remember to check some website to find out what I'm doing.
Of course, since then I've started spending more time on the whole "Blogging in my Blog cuz I'm a Blogger" thing. I've also managed to reduce most of my inter-personal communications to one or two line text messages, often accompanied by an emoticon*. And I've been told that my best artistic endeavors are often found in my status message on Google Talk.
Anyway, it turns out that the whole thing is much more zero-interface than I would have thought. Of course, there's the web view, which is very much boring-in-a-good-way but has been primary useful as only when telling someone about the site, or blogging about it. The ideal way to use Twitter is via text. You can send in updates, check on your friends, and even nudge others to update either by SMS (text message) or IM (chat). You can also have Twitter send you notifications of your friends' updates by either of those methods, although I don't recommend the SMS notifications if you're paying for text messages.
When I created my account last weekend, I registered both my phone and my Google Talk account and the whole process took about five minutes. The longest part was waiting for Google Talk to catch up after I added twitter@twitter.com. Since then, whenever I'm bored, I've been updating it with whatever I'm doing, thinking about, or banging my head against. I've set my notifications to come in via IM as well, so I see my friends' updates in the same window. If I get busy and don't want to be bothered, sending the text off turns off notifications. After that, I can either get recent updates from friends with get or get username or just turn notifications back on. Oh, and if I'm wondering what someone is doing, nudge username will prod them into action (sometimes, depending on the person).
Of course, the same should work with any chat client, but if you're not into IM the any phone with SMS capability will do. I'd probably leave notifications off quite a bit more often if I was doing it that way, and (particularly if I had to pay for text messages - poor L-a) I might update once or twice a day at most. Still, if that were my case I think I might value it more in some ways, since I'd have less chance to just talk for entertainment purposes.
My advise? Go sign up, check it out for a few days. The process is brief and, although you are giving up email, IM and cell phone. I'm not worried, as I expect the privacy policy to hold given the pedigree of the founders, Obvious Corp, who also created Odeo and (most recently) Hellodeo.
Oh, and when you do, hit my page and click the Add Oliver Wendell Jones button on the left. You may even be able to just Add Me To Twitter with this link, once you're signed up. Then let me know at owenj23-at-gmail-dot-com, in case I don't notice right away. I haven't found enough people on there yet to really be sure how the friend notifications work; that's why I need my loyal readers to help me learn. Let me know if anyone is trying and has trouble; I started to take some screenshots to write a step-by-step, but it seemed intuitive enough to me that I didn't complete the effort.
*While this isn't quite true, I do sometimes go in another room so I can argue with The Brat via GTalk. Trust me, it's easier that way.
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