Follow the Coffee Addict on Twitter

For the longest time readers kept nagging about this thing called Twitter. I have been avoiding it because is sounded like another one of those trendy Internet time drains. Email, blogs, chat, RSS, Facebook... who has time to tune in to yet another stream of chatter?

However, there is nothing like Twitter. It is a web site where you can broadcast very short messages (maximum of 140 characters) to anyone who is signed up to receive them. It's like a cross between a blog and chat room. Your followers might include your friends from high school or if you're Barack Obama, over 250,000 of your most tech-savvy fans. (BTW he hasn't sent out a single Twitter message since taking office. Where are his priorities?)

Meanwhile, you sign up to receive the utterances of other people. Eventually, your screen fills with a scrolling display of their quips — jokes, recommended links, thoughts for the day, and a lot of “what I’m doing right now” stuff. For these reasons I invite you to follow me on Twitter. If you don't get any value from it, close its window and never come back and this is fine.

Click here to follow me!

Twitter is precisely what you want it to be. It can be a business tool, a teenage time-killer, a research assistant, a news source — whatever. There are no rules, or at least none that apply equally well to everyone.