I’ve fallen into a new addiction over the last month. It’s called Twitter. It is a way to keep in touch with people that are online.

At it’s most basic, Twitter is a series of 146 character answers to the question “What are you doing?” In reality, it can be anything from a communication toy to a way to keep track of how you spend your time and what you do everyday.

Once you sign up for Twitter, you fill-in a basic profile and provide an avatar. Next, you fill-in what you are doing and wait. As you acquire friends and followers, you see what they are doing and they see what you are doing. Simple, clean, easy to use:

You can post from your phone, the web interface, or any of a number of tools that Twitter-fans have created to “improve” the concept. I use the web to post or Twadget, a Vista sidebar gadget that lets you post see your friends posts. (Fun fact: When Twadget is running, every post causes a bird twitter sound. Drives the husband nuts. When it is broken he calls it a “twagety”. Flip side is, it reminds me to turn off the sound for the tablet every night so that the other audible reminders don’t sound either.)

There are several other interface applications written for Twitter. Check out TwitterVision and TwitterMap - they let you see where the latest twitters are coming from. Another tool I found when playing around is TwitThis. TwitThis lets you send a twitter from a webpage to show what you are reading. I found it via “Freakitude Technology Blog” (http://tinyurl.com/2s9eql)

There are plenty of more great twittertoys out there.. To see them, Google Twitter. Oh, and while you play, make me a friend. You can find me under the Twitter name callkathy!

The fun comes in as your friends and followers lists grow. Some call it “StalkMeNow.com”. Bruce doesn’t get it. My question is: Do you?

[tags]twitter, callkathy,twadget[/tags]