Yeah... I'm on Twitter!

Some people might say "It's about time."

You might say "Who cares?"

Still others might say "Huh? Twitter?"

According to their "About Us" page, Twitter is:

"... a real-time short messaging service that works over multiple networks and devices."

Twitter is like Facebook, that is, if you take away everything except the "What are you doing right now?" box. Twitter lets you post short messages about what you're doing and people can "follow" your posts. There's also nice Facebook application that actually fetches your updates from Twitter so you don't have to update this twice.

So... if you want to follow me on Twitter, you can find me at:

http://twitter.com/mghiemstra

... although I'm not sure just yet how exciting that will be ;)

Some people refer to Twitter as "micro blogging", since it only allows short posts and some people use it as their personal journal of sorts. Twitter has been growing fast and there's other similar sites too (like Pownce, Jaiku or Identi.ca).

Once nice thing about Twitter, is that you can send your updates via your cell phone (SMS), although with my current plan this sets me back 15 cents each time.

Also very helpful is the TwitterFox Firefox add-on that lets you see updates from people you follow and send an update without having to go to the Twitter site.

2009/01/16 Update: Just over a month and 50 tweets later and I'm still using Twitter. I've learned a bunch about the Twitter community, a bit about one of the execs at work (@noddson), got the scoop on a newspaper story a day early from @mwalcoff, got some strange followers (at least one spam account) and even got a few replies from unexpected (but welcome) followers (like @make aka Phillip Torrone).