First of all, if you don't know what twitter is, it's a glorified status message that can morph into a conversation, a solution, a bunch of new contacts, or a great way to suck away time. Wow, if that isn't a definition. A better example: it's an unobtrusive instant message.

I've been connected to Twitter for about a week now. I only signed on because I have heard so much about it, but couldn't grasp the concept of why it's so popular. A word that describes why it's popular is, community.

I started following the one guy I knew on the system who has 79 followers, aka buddies that follow his messages. After accepting my messages, he put out a message, 'Hey, this guy is new. He's a developer and posts a lot of pictures of his dogs.' By the end of the day, I had 8 people following me. Two locally.

Today I am up to 12 followers and I am following 17 other twitters. In the list I am following, is the guy that developed a major javascript framework and works for Mozilla, the author of one my favorite web comics, and up till recently Woot.com. Woot posts a crazy amount of messages and I didn't need to be tempted to buy anymore crap.

Also this week, I was tipped off by another Twitter-r to an impromptu live video conference for a guy that freelances out of San Fransisco and is kind of a B list of bloggers. About 12 people joined the conference and he only publicized it on Twitter a few minutes before starting.

I think why I am addicted to it is because it's instant, there's not a bunch of crap that gets in the way of communication, no one pokes me and I am not blasted with someone's profile music, and if I want to disconnect and not follow along, no one cares. If it's an immediate form of communication there are other ways to communicate with me.

It's found a good place in between emails and blog comments. If you want to follow me, http://twitter.com/gotshoo.

Anyone else Twitter?