3: bird is the word

I'm hopelessly addicted to Twitter. I love it in a way that it isn't totally healthy to love a social networking application. I went so far as to design a lesson plan around it for one of the classes I'm taking this semester, and in a really ill-considered fit of motivation, volunteered to teach the lesson. Like, to real people in a real library. This was maybe not so smart, but that's another story.

Anyway, I was thinking about this today, and I realized that what I like about Twitter is the instantaneous access it gives you to a lot of people's thoughts. An extension in my browser (TwitterFox, if you are interested, which you should be, because it is awesome) pops up these little 140-word messages in the lower right-hand corner of my screen whenever anyone updates. Former coworkers and NPR newsgatherers and friends from school and the people at my library's reference desk and some of my oldest, closest friends and my favorite bloggers whom I'll never meet -- they are all lumped together and given equal weight. Something about the equity and fairness of that appeases my Libra sensibility, and also entertains me and makes me feel weirdly connected to the human race. I feel like that's what we're going for with all of this Web 2.0 stuff... we want technology to link us together and make our worlds feel less isolated, and in this case, I think it works.

(Join Twitter! Yes, you! Why am I always pressuring people to do stuff here? Is it annoying? Don't answer that.)