Steve and the World, Sitting in a Tree...

I joined Twitter. I’m the newest bird tweeting away in the Twitter tree.

I didn’t really want to join. I was Googling the web looking for someone I’d lost touch with several years ago, and lo I found a person who seemed to be her twittering away. And it was her, and considering she lives in Florida, it just shows how parochial the world is these days.

But what a strange thing this Twitter is. I’d not joined more than two minutes and already I had a ‘follower’. It made me feel like Jesus. :-) It also felt uncomfortably like someone was stalking me. Who was this complete stranger poised who-knows-where on the edge of their seat all excited and waiting for me to ‘tweet’ something? I was all flustered, as if I should say something memorable. “Take me to your leader”, or something.

And the lexicon? It’s texting gone mad. It’s all c u l8r, and r u ok, as folk desperately try to condense messages into the 149 or whatever characters allowed. As a word purist, it breaks my heart to see the English language bastardised like this. But given its popularity with the young—I was watching a young girl text at the football match the other day, well you do when you support Everton, and her fingers were an absolute blur on the phone’s keypad—maybe we’ll evolve into a race who actually communicate like this in the real world. If so, I think I’ll give up and go back simian.

So, I don’t know if I’ll use Twitter much—it’s already served the purpose I had for it—but if you want to tweet at me, my user name is escapee3. Who knows, maybe you’ll convert me?

Bird bath, anyone?