Some Thoughts on Twitter

We have had the internet in our house for 15 years.

I remember having dinner with friends and the conversation rolled around to this thing called Internet. I asked my friend Dan if he had seen it and what he thought of it. He wasn't overly impressed, but thought he might try it for a few months to play around with it. Dan was our Geeky expert back then, and none of us did anything computer related without asking him first.

My daughter came home from her part-time job one evening with a disk (floppy) offering free access to this phenomenon and said her friend at work was raving about it and we had to try it. It was free. What could it hurt?

At that time our computer was an IBM 286 with a hard drive equivalent to a recordable DVD. We used the computer for word processing and that's about it. It ran on DOS.

I called Dan, and he said we would have to upgrade to something called Windows and he would be over to help. He arrived with a stack of 15 or 20 floppies - the Windows system 3.1. It took forever to load onto the computer and when it finished we had virtually no drive space left.

We had to install a modem. I still cringe when I hear the sound of that dial-up connector.

We somehow managed to get connected to the net - but it was awful. Pictures took forever to load, and everything was soooooo sloooooow. I knew we had to upgrade the computer. I knew there was something in this internet thing and I had to know more about it. We upgraded to a 386. That sounds so lame now, but the difference in performance was amazing and my daughter and I were hooked. Hubby not so much. He couldn't see the attraction and didn't think it would last.

Back then, the first thing everybody did was look for a chat room. There were chats for everything - every interest - some good - and some just plain trouble. I was lucky to find an area called WWB or WWA - or something like that. It had chats for every age group and all major countries. I decided to start with the A's and move through all the countries until I got to the end. I never made it past Australia, because there I 'met' a group of people who were so entertaining that I didn't want to leave. All walks of life - all relationship variations - and all ages. It was easy to get caught up and chat for hours - and back then we paid for service by the hour.

The system ran out of money or sponsors and closed after a couple of years, but I still maintain contact with some of those people by e-mail and consider them to be good friends.

What has this got to do with Twitter? I'll tell you. (You knew I would).

Twitter works on the same principal as the old chat rooms, except you have to go out and find friends or be found by them. The Twitter symbol is showing up on web pages all over - all you have to do is follow someone who interests you, or has similar interests and off you go. Short messages are transmitted at any time of day or night - and you don't even have to be online to receive messages.

I see Twitter as informational, fun, intriguing, and at times a major time waster. There is almost always someone online to answer questions, and when you have a myriad of brains to pick you're almost sure to get the answer you're seeking.

Computers have come a long way since the old 286, and so has the way we pass information and learn.

I remember when computers were the size of buildings and info was carried around on punch cards that had to be sorted by monster machines. Everything was in binary code. Ahhh geeeze - I'm waxing nostalgic and getting off topic again.

Twitter is here and I hope it sticks around for a while.