Twitter me

I created a Twitter account today for the same reason I do a lot of things I don’t really want to do: Everyone else was doing it.

For those of you who don’t know, Twitter is a social networking site that allows users to constantly provide 140-word updates about their lives and read the updates of others as well.

If you imagine just reading all of your friends’ status updates on Facebook, Twittering is basically the exact same experience, as far as I can tell.

In fact, the only difference I could really see was that Twitter uses a more honest terminology. As we all know, Facebook refers to those we stalk as our “friends.” I would hardly say that someone is my “friend” just because I enjoy keeping tabs on them every day and because they might make an occasional appearance in certain fantasies of mine.

But Twitter refers to these people, completely accurately and un-ironically, as people you are “following.”

Within 60 seconds of creating my account this morning, I saw that I already had one follower. I’ve dreamed my whole life of having a following, so this made me feel extremely important, like I was the leader of a dangerous civil rights movement or perhaps the president of a small-scale cult.

I clicked on the link to view the profile of my one loyal patron, whose name turned out to be “Matt from date.com.”  

Obviously, I was flattered. Less than five minutes with an account, and already the kinds of unmarried men who browse Twitter in the middle of the workday were deciding I was a hottie. And I was hardly even discouraged to discover that Matt was also following 250 other women – although I later realized that there was no way he could even know I was such a hottie since the only picture I had up was a clip art image of kangaroo. Unless he is into that kind of thing.

As I thought about how to describe my current whereabouts to the Twitter community for my first update, I couldn’t help but remember the days long ago when my dad would forbid me to give out any kind of identifying information in Nickelodeon chat rooms, back when we all still had a healthy fear of strangers and pedophiles.

I realized that this must be such an exciting time for sex offenders, who no longer have to pretend to be 12-year-old girls seeking pen pals in order to get information out of potential victims.  

Social networking sites make it so much easier to plan “chance” encounters that it’s almost impossible not to. The rest of us are eerily willing and eager to provide online updates as direct and uninhibited as “Kim is at the Starbucks on the corner of Kirkwood and Indiana and will be here all night,” or “Mary is at home, lonely and wasted. Door’s unlocked.”

But whatever, times are changing. Twitter me!