For a long time I tried to ignore social networks, but now I found twitter and at least for the moment I can definitely see why there is such a hype around it. I started blogging about two weeks ago and I’m already feeling that I won’t be able to blog as much as I want because I simply lack the time.
It’s different with twitter. It’s easy to stop for a moment and write 160 characters tops and while you’re at it check your timeline and read about the things your friends or people you are interested in do. Granted most of it is trivial but as explained in the twitter intro video most of our life takes place in the little things and knowing what our friends do or have on their minds creates the feeling of sharing their lives.
My consequence is that I will be using twitter for a while and see what happens. But I’ll not tell everyone how much milk I’m going to buy when I get to the supermarket in about five minutes because there are things that even the people most interested in sharing my life will not care about. So I guess the challenge is to find the right degree of trivial. 
Even so I have a twitter acount. I wasn’t able to feel the thrill of changing every single fact of my every day life. So I gave up writing but read the tweets of friends now and then. We’ll see if your tweets will change something
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Have fun! And by the way how many bottles of milk have you bought today?
Too bad, I specifically hoped to stay in contact with friends that live to far away to visit, take Switzerland for example, its a little too far for a Sunday trip (at least for the moment).
About the milk thing … there was no shopping of milk today. I just wondered about the psychological effect of knowing what friends do all the time. It’s almost like back in elementary school where friends shared almost everything – and the bonds of friendship where pretty strong back then.
I wonder if there is some scientific study around friendship and the forming of bonds which takes the twitter phenomenon or at least virtual social networks into consideration.
Actually, the sociologists even have a term for it: ambient awareness
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html
Das ist hier ja alles auf Englisch, da versteht man kein Wort. Und auf der Twitter-Seite auch. Warum?
Theo, I was actually waiting for you to ask that question.
There are three true things I have to say about this:
1) I do not want to address German readers only and I’m fairly confident that most of my contacts are rather fluent in English.
2) Most of the things I read are in written English and it feels natural to comment in English
3) I like the language … a lot
I know we are debating over this since we went to school together which makes it about 15 to 20 years. So please forgive me if I do not want to argue about it here. I really want to talk about the content of the articles not the value or shortcomings of different languages (well maybe there will be an article at some point, but not right now). We can of course continue debating on this directly if you think there are aspects we did not consider in the last 15 years which I seriously doubt.