The Nice Niche That Twitter Fills

I learned about Twitter over the weekend and I saw it coming: this thing is pretty addictive. I don't intend to scare you away from it, but consider yourself warned.

Now, on to the good stuff. What is Twitter? As they state it on their site, it is:

A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?

Sounds simple? It is. You can post at most 140 characters at a time (micro-posts, if you ask me) from your cell phone (m.twitter.com) through IM, or directly through the Twitter web site.

Why would something like that be useful? Granted that some people DO post every five minutes about EVERYTHING they are doing (I am not kidding), I see the use for it in order to write short posts about topics that you would normally not feel compelled to write a longer post about, yet you find del.icio.us to be limiting: you want to do more than social bookmarking but less than blogging, if that makes sense.

Examples: logging events that you can later go back to ("when did I meet with such an such?", "where did I see that?"), remembering "best of" things ("I Just tried a glass of a fantastic Marques de Riscal Rioja Reserva, 2003 vintage -best wine I've had in a while"). See my point?

If you feel inclined to twitting, you can add me as a friend at http://twitter.com/askmanny.