Understanding Twitter

As I come up to speed on the latest communications technology I have stumbled across several fellow bloggers using Twitter. Click on someone’s Twitter link and you get their stream of consciousness-touch base ‘tweets’ with others in their contact list. (Interesting these are called ‘tweets’ rather than ‘twits’!) But there is no story, no point it seems if you are not part of their tribe. I don’t see why someone else would care about a single sentence touch base that is little more than a text message by another format. Maybe it just says, “hey, I’m here, and this is what I’m doing today”. But who cares? Does someone really care that I’m at the grocery store buying groceries yet again? Probably not. Of interest, Malcolm Gladwell tweets an observation that a bread truck stopped and gave some bread to a homeless fellow. This kind of observation and the story implied by one word ‘inspiring’ is far more interesting than a first person account of somebody’s day.