David Hellman

As recently as yesterday, I enjoyed a scoff over the inanity of twitter, the service that enables peoploids across the internet to broadcast the minutia of their lives. It’s a step beyond myspace, beyond youtube, elevating indiscriminate self-aggrandizement to a whole other level of compulsion. This was my crotchety opinion less than 24 hours ago. But as I type this, the monster truck wheels of technological and cultural progression are bearing down on me. For the first time, I am about to tweet.

This is happening because I met the Area 5 guys for ice cream yesterday. I observed how they used twitter not just to keep up socially, but also to follow the work of friends and colleagues. When Ryan O’Donnell declared that he never checks blogs anymore — he just uses twitter to find reading material — I visualized myself in Montana, calcifying in the strata of an exposed cliff.

So: http://twitter.com/davidhellman

My plan is to use it to announce blog stuff, or other things I’m doing. Professional stuff. That’s the plan! We’ll see how long it takes for laundry updates to start. And I’m looking forward to finding out how it changes my reading habits, changes my awareness of what friends are up to, etc. Hey, we are living in the future, and new systems are needed to keep track of all the crazy futuristic things going on.