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E-mail a friendYOUNG VOICES
Everybody's Tweeting on the Twitter
Twitter has officially arrived. It's been around for ages, of course (going on three years now, a veritable eon in Internet time), but now that Oprah's doing it, we can pretty much safely say that everybody else is, too. And if they're not, they will be soon.
Winfrey's Twitter feed appeared Friday and attracted more than 100,000 followers within hours. But that's far from the biggest news on Twitter these days. Ashton Kutcher (of trucker cap-wearing, Demi Moore-marrying, prank-playing fame) recently surpassed a million followers, one-upping CNN as the site's most popular feed.
This, of course, raises all kinds of questions about what kind of a place Twitter is, who uses it, and what for. It also makes CNN look pretty silly, but not for the first time.
If you're like me, you may not still be confused about exactly what Twitter is, but you're probably still a little unclear as to why anyone needs it. Like Buddhism and the musical career of Bruce Willis, the more you understand, the more confusing it gets.
If we can get past, for a moment, the question of why we should be motivated to share with friends and strangers alike the minutiae of our lives every few hours, we ought to focus on the more important question of why the heck would anyone care? I mean, I don't care about half the stuff I do in a given day, so why should anyone else?
You go ahead and contemplate this, and get back to me when you figure it out. In the meantime, I've got some serious tweeting to do.