Twitter it's ok, nobody can hear you

Twitter. It's like Eastenders. It looks tatty. The content is deplorable. It's reason for existing questionable. Yet in a gossipy kind of way its oddly addictive.

What's wrong: lists of micro-blogs which people try to use as conversations, largely to try to be in-touch with some celebrity. Yet you can't make sense of what statement triggered which reply.

What's it for: (a) self promotion; (b) confirmation that you've connected with an audience. It's also just a great way to see who likes you. Most famous users will find themselves followed by thousands. For others its kind of like buying a 60GB iPod and finding out you've only got 10GB of music. All those years building a music library, thinking it was impressive and only to find out its insignificant.

Who it works best for: media types with things to promote and egos to bolster. Or to put in another way creative people who need to get their output noticed.

Why it's so successful: it's used by people in the public eye which gets it noticed. Plus the followers feel in-touch with their heroes.

It's so odd watching successful people with interesting day jobs tweeting endlessly throughout the day. I mean I'm a boring bastard with nothing happening in my life but you'd think Graham Linehan would have something better to do, wouldn't you?

Odd too that these 'famous' people don't seem to hold with private messaging systems, like MSN, as they're much happier holding open conversations with each other over the interwebs. Such as this following conversation between two funny female comedians and frequent Radio 4 botherers:

@SusanCalman would you like to go out Friday?
@SarahMillican75 sure. fun will be our middle names.

It's this eavesdropping on conversations that makes it the digital equivalent of holding a glass up to the wall to hear the neighbours, only now your neighbours are much more interesting people.

You can even attempt to shout back at your online neighbours. Tweet a little reply. Well, they call it a reply but it's just another entry in your own personal timeline. It might appear in the person's timeline whose tweet you're replying to. But that all depends on their filters. Anyway they won't be able to make sense of it and since they'll get 60 tweets a second the chances are they won't notice it.

You see your glass is pressed up against the walls of so many neighbours that you can't tell whose talking to who and if you try to get a word in they can't hear you above their own noise.

But it is a great place for mutual agreement and that sort of positive reinforcement can be quite refreshing, I imagine, particularly for people who get a regular mauling in the public media. Consider the excitement of discovering that your every utterance is meeting with the instant approval of people happy to call themselves your followers.

"I love coco."
"You're so right, I love it too. I'm glad you exist. Please, please keep on existing."

Me too. I'm glad they all exist. I'm glad twitter exists. I'm loving it.