Twitter Nation: Nobody cares what you’re doing

By Helen A.S. Popkin

Meet Twitter, the new kid in school. This social networking service seems friendly enough, plays well with other technologies, and is totally cool in a geeky sort of way. Like Rivers Cuomo on serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

Twitter invites anyone with a computer to open an account and get their own personal Web page. There, they can upload endless updates on their doings in 140 characters or less. Twitter members can invite friends to join or hook up with new friends via the service and receive instant updates from everyone with whom they choose to connect.

Twitter’s chatty nature and intuitive usability resulted in instant popularity, and soon Twitter was hangin’ in the inner most circle of the tech-savvy in-crowd. So, as anybody who ever went high school could predict, affable Twitter started picking up enemies as well. To quote this now endlessly quoted line from the biggest in-crowder of all, tech blogger Robert Scoble, “Twitter hate is the new black."...More?

Twitter Nation: Nobody cares what you’re doing - Netiquette - MSNBC.com