Tweet a Twit.

After holding out for the past few months, I finally succumbed (something I seem to be doing a lot of these days) and registered for Twitter today. The main motivation being the ability to say anything, anywhere, in hopefully intelligibly bite-sized portions without the need to compose one's thoughts and write in prose. Mental Diarrhoea if you will.

Registration was fast and painless, an extension of the twittering culture of instantaneous public communication and within 2 mins, Aelgtoer was officially on twitter. Browsing through some twits tweets, it soon became apparent how potentially facile and superficial twitter could be.

Here we have an essentially public SMS service that allows you to broadcast anything, anytime with the knowledge that your friends would be updated on whatever you posted and that anyone else on the net might potentially stumble on your tweet. And let's face it, how often would one have something witty or noteworthy to share? I'd bet it doesn't happen on an hourly basis, let alone every 5 mins unless you're in the Artic being chased by a rabid polar bear in a leopaaard preen outfit that says BOOMZ. In which case maybe you should tweet Riz Low to join you on your Artic amazing race.

So most of the time, people end up posting banal crap like ' Oh had dinner already. Not bad. Going to watch TV now.' or 'Watching the world go by in my underwear.' knowing fully that friends and followers would be kept fully abreast of their every move should they choose so. Not one tweety shriek about bloodsuckers and a horde of mozzies goes unnoticed in the great world wide web.

Given some people's propensity to spew copious amounts of barely intelligible dross on their facebook pages and 'like' comments by the millions just to mark their virtual presence, the transition to twitter, a more viral and public version of the 'phenomenon' that is facebooking, would be like water on a duck's back. The joy at this new found freedom of cyber voyeurism where individuals ironically sacrifice privacy in exchange for the empowerment derived from disclosing knowledge of dubious usefulness at any given time while knowing that people would be forced to read the same, would inevitably lead to an explosion of tweets and frivolous comments.

Like I mentioned to CS, what's to stop anyone from intimately describing their toiletry habits or recounting banal daily events that are an abysmal bore? There isn't. Which is why you find tweets like "Pang sai-ing in toilet.. it's going to be a long day.." It's going to be a longer day for whatever unfortunate soul who has to be updated on your shitting habits at an inconvenient time (say lunch).

So while I do understand the allure of tweeting over blogging, in that it's short, sweet, convenient and something you'd be forcibly updating your followers on (though I can imagine if all you do is to tweet about eating and shitting, you won't have many followers left, I'd be the first to leave for sure); there are times when blogging just cannot be replaced. After all there is a limit to how much you can elucidate in 140 characters and such a spartan mode of expression can be inadequate for conveying certain ideas / rants. Not to mention the fact that you can't really bitch as much as you'd like in a tweet and 1000 tweets do not make a single blog post.

Though you know what they say la, when in Rome do what the Romans do. Now wouldn't you like to know what porn clip I'm wanking off to? *Sweet Smile*