I like the Twitter a lot. I live-Twittered 109 college basketball games last season, and I've even created several Twitter robots. One of them has sports scores from America, and another one has soccer results from places that are not America. I even made a special robot that tells me what the weather's going to be today where I live. I like Twitter so much I own a Fail Whale t-shirt to help support the artist who drew it. I've been on Twitter long enough that my KyleWhale avatar is usually somewhere near the top of follower lists ranked by tenure. In that time, I've defined my relationship to Twitter, as one must eventually do with any technology, and I've made my decisions about what it is.

Millions of other people have made that decision for themselves, too. Twitter is telegrams without the news, a ball-point pen, a subway platform conversation, maybe even the second coming of the telephone itself. Twitter challenges creative folks to shoehorn big thoughts into 140 characters, and it's a way for others to consume celebrity culture in unprecedented ways. What's fascinating to me is that such a uncomplicated data construct is capable of being so many different things to so many different people.