Twitter is great for keeping up with buddies, true. It works not unlike the status messages on Facebook, where you can leave a breadcrumb trail for your buddies and family. “So you never actually have to pick up the phone!” points out my sister, a new Facebook user.
But Twitter’s message trail is public and far more accessible. And that allows everyone to follow the zeitgeist everywhere all the time. And that’s just lovely.
It also allows some of us to live subliminally through your fabulous life. The feeds can come to us through our celly, our rss reader, a lovely desktop app or three we can find at Twitter, from widgets on your laptop, and also any way you like to receive feeds that you think up all by yourself. Lots of ways to get your Twitter.
Not having nearly as many digital folks in my life at my age as other Twitterers might, I developed a habit early in the life of Twitter of eavesdropping on other lives more digital and shiny than my own. One of my favorite stalkees is Jeffrey Zeldman, whose Twitters are here, and whose blog here.
Twitter stalking doesn’t always pay off in any way other than to remind me that, like Locke and Michael, I’ve got more work to do. But sometimes it pays big. To wit: About 20 hours before this writing, Zeldman twittered:
“Studio mailbox fills up every two days with unwanted irrelevant catalogs and come-ons. It’s a tree holocaust out there.”
And he got back, well, probably a lot of advice, but including that which he twittered back three hours later:
“ Thanks all, especially for http://greendimes.com and http://www.catalogchoice.org/“
See? Worth staring through Twitter feeds into other people’s windows? I think so. Check out these sites, make your life better. Sometimes subliminally living is living, after all…
Heh. I knew it.
Oh, hey, here we are on Twitter too, in case, you know, you like to watch.
Marie-Claire points out that if you’re new to Twitter, the CommonCraft Show on Twitter is a really good help.
