Making Sense of Twitter

Don't get Twitter? A lot of folks don't. But Lileks gets to the heart of what makes Twitter appealing about as good as I know how:

It’s a false sense of company, I know - when I called the Twitter feed a portable box of imaginary friends, I meant it. But not entirely. If I met any of those folks for the first time, I’d know something. Same with this site: We cracked 10,000 comments yesterday, folks - and it’s not just the wit and civility I appreciate, it’s the company you provide.

Now, I’m not alone. Wife and child and dog, of course, and now that I’m at the paper involved in a project, I have actual co-workers in a sense I haven’t had since I started at the paper . But nowadays we get to live our lives in the micro and the macro sense; you walk out of the building to feed the meter, and sneak a look at the Twitter feed, and all these voices burst out like a dozen Jack-in-the-Box heads. I can’t imagine living without it because I can remember living without it. The Tower of Babel turns out to be an interesting place after all.

Like all things on the Internet, Twitter risks the doom of one day fading away. But not today.

(Lileks' link goes to his Bleat home-page and that changes from day to day. I'll post a link to the relevant archived page later. Make sense? Don't worry. I'll take care of it.)

(Update: Lileks' link updated, as promised.)