Reluctantly Assimilated

I didn't want to join.  It was against my better judgment.

I am, of course, talking about Twitter.

I have some buddies that jumped on the bandwagon before me.  They would microblog their mundane activities.  I couldn't think of a bigger waste of time on something so uninteresting.

Pretty soon, I was bookmarking their Twitter pages.  Just so I could laugh at them, I told myself.

And then the unthinkable happened:  every so often, I would want to respond to something they'd posted.  Just a little commentary here, a bit of sarcasm there, or a casual question on something new they'd learned.

But to do that, I needed a Twitter account.

After signing up, I rarely updated my own status.  I didn't have access to the site from work, and didn't think about it when I was home.

Then I found I could update my status via text message from my mobile.

I now have nearly 1200 updates.

Most of the time, it's about nothing interesting.  Just yesterday, my own mother called my Twitter page 'boring'.

I do find it occasionally useful, though.  Take today, for instance.  My wife called me saying she had sliced her finger open on a rotary blade while sewing and needed to go to the ER.  I used my mobile to inform Twitter where I was going and what I was doing.

Three minutes later, I had concerned replies from four of my buddies.

It's the perfect platform for blasting information to lots of people at once without using archaic email lists.

Those tracking the updates can choose how they receive them.  Two of my buddies got the update on their mobile phones when I posted today.  Another got it on his TweetDeck desktop application.  The last saw it on Facebook, which I pipe my Twitter RSS feed into.

So, rather than laugh at my friends who twisted my arm into signing up, I now gladly join them.

Even if my mother does think I'm boring.