Twitter?

I just hooked up with Twitter. I've heard a lot about it recently, in particular how it is written using Ruby on Rails (I need to confirm if that's true - yep, it is: [1]). It's an interesting idea, in a weird kind of way. I'm not at all sure if I get the process yet (if there is anything really to get about it), but two things stand out for me after about 14 hours of Tweeting, one very interesting and one a little bit left field.

Firstly, I love the fact that from within Twitter I can click a button that miraculously adds my current Twitter state of mind directly into my Blogspot blog. It's not actually the low level technical details of that that impress me (not to devalue them in any way), but what that action represents. What's intriguing is that when I make that connection between my tweets and my blog, I'm actually creating a semantic connection between Twitter and Blogspot. Ok, I know that's kind of stating the bloody obvious, but the point is simply that this connection is basically the Vic 20 of the Semantic Web, and it makes me really wonder what the 8-core MacPro version will look like!

The second thing I've noticed (and this really does have nothing to do with technology) is that Twitter reminds me of a peculiar idiom that pops up every now and again in conversations. Wierdly, this seems to occur most often with Americans. I'm not sure what it is about American sensibilities that makes this the case, but that just seems to be my experience. The idiom I'm referring to is the way some people vocalise their internal monologue. For example, if I am going to sit down on a chair, I simply sit down. I don't generally find the internal decision making process about which chair to sit on and when particularly relevant to anyone else. However, some people really do find it necessary to tell you about it. "I'm just going to sit down over here, Ok?" And like that last sentence, often ask innocent bystanders for approval or confirmation. Unfortunately, I get a little bit of that sense from Twitter.

M@

[1] Apparently, Twitter does use Rails. "By various metrics, Twitter is the biggest Rails site on the net right now," Alex Payne, Twitter Developer.