I'm one of those Luddites who still don't understand the appeal of Twitter. For those of you who are lucky enough to have never heard of it, here's what it is according to the Twitter FAQ:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

I usually have a simple answer to that simple question: None of your business. And even my closest friends rarely hear that question from me except in the rhetorical sense, e.g. screaming "What the fuck are you doing?" when they try to jaywalk across a busy road or do something similarly stupid. I love my friends, but I just can't bring myself to care enough about the boring little details of their lives.

A lot of Twitter users (or, as I call them, twittards) sound like Tamagochis to me. I'm hungry! I'm bored! I'm sad! I need to poop! I'm sleepy! Snore. This episode of Lore Sjoberg's Alt Text pretty much sums up how I feel about Twitter.

So why do we suddenly have a new Twitter widget over there on the right sidebar? Well, I signed up for an account a few weeks ago after constant peer pressure from Jeff and Tiff. Those two monsters left me alone after that, and I hadn't actually posted any tweets (or followed anyone else's, heh). But now, I've decided to give it a try. The second part of the answer to "What is Twitter?" in the FAQ gave me some hope that this Twitter thing wouldn't be completely useless:

Bloggers can use it as a mini-blogging tool. Developers can use the API to make Twitter tools of their own. Possibilities are endless!

The "Possibilities are endless!" part is foolishly optimistic (and mathematically impossible) for a system that limits messages to 140 characters, but the concept of microblogging does seem mildly interesting. I guess I can share with you the little things--YouTube videos, CNN news articles, Lolcats--that make me laugh during all the hours I spend mindlessly surfing the Web.

So follow me on Twitter and allow me to help you waste a few minutes of your precious time everyday. Yay!