I joined twitter a few weeks ago, after Steve asked me if I was on Twitter.

But I was a bit reluctant posting this on my blog because I didn't get the point of reading what others are doing, or saying to my list of followers what I was doing at any give moment.

Not that now I get it completely, but more than I did when I signed up a few weeks ago

What is Twitter?

Someone (don't remember who, sorry for the anonymous citation) said that twitter is what you do between a blog post and another.

Someone else says it's like a chat, but much better. Jeff Atwood calls it the combination of blogging and IM.

I'd say, if a blog post is like sending an email cc'ed to the World, sending a twitter update is like sending an IM to the World or, as Steve suggested, like sending an IM status update to the World.

There are various way to interact with twitter:

• you can do it with your mobile phone, sending and receiving updates as SMS (or TXT as they call them in NZ)
• you can sent and receive updates using your favorite IM client
• you can use the web UI and the RSS feed of your list of friend
• or you can a desktop client like Twitteroo

Now, if I'm wondering why Phil is taking so long to answer the email I can just look at the list of his events and see he is "playing soccer and watching a polo game", or I can see random thoughts of the people in my list.

So, if you want to know what I'm doing right now, just go to my personal twitter page twitter.com/simonech, and you might even want to add me as friend in order to get my thoughts and "status updates" delivered as soon as I post them.