Watching the web

When poets talk of the birds twittering in the trees, a different picture is now evoked.

Imagine sparrows and starlings pecking away at laptops, telling the other birds who are ‘following them’ what they’re doing. Twittering or, more correctly, tweeting, reached critical mass a few months ago when Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross both decided to use Twitter. But what is it?

Twitter explained

Twitter is a social networking site. You register, say what you’re doing (e.g. I’m making a cup of tea/can’t find my keys/filing for bankruptcy), find other people that you know or have heard of and ‘follow them’. That means that you can see their status. This was clearly invented by someone under the age of 30, since anyone over that age would stand with their hands on their hips and say, ‘What is the point of that?’ It seems pointless, but, like many pointless things, it’s extremely popular.