Andre

If tweets, those 140 character messages sent on the Twitter service, are in fact nothing more than status updates and we personify objects, events and actions, then anything measurable can tweet.

The question everyone answers with their tweets is "What are you doing?"
The answer to that should be another counter-question: "Do we care to read?"

Even a simple tree could tweet about what it sees all day, how it interacts with insects, animals and the wind, how it grows, sheds leaves.. A private tweet to me by my laundry machine might still be useful to me at least but does the world need to know? Isn't it enough already when I tell it to all in my own tweet stream?

Fictional accounts like @DarthVader are fun to read, and so are real, human accounts like @_Syma_. Both can't tweet on their own and thus rely on real people who write their stories. However, this is only so long fun as it stays within the account's personality.

Using Twitter as a micro-blog, the daily life of a tree indeed could turn into a beautiful story when carefully written - with a professional level of children books or poetry in mind. Otherwise it would turn into a dead branch of the twitterverse. Why not let an atom whine about its breakup?

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A thought about "followers" on Twitter versus "friends" on about most other social (network) services.

There is something seriously wrong with the usage of "friend" when people clean up their social lists by removing 100s of "unknown friends". If those you follow on Twitter become real friends, it's because you have learned something about them or have communicated with them first.

You "follow" people/services because you are interested in their updates. I personally don't believe in the blind following out of courtesy. What I like about Twitter is that it is about "followers" and not like other sites where the whole world is your - often unknown - "friend".

"Thx for follow" tweets can be annoying but when they are links to "thx for follow" pages with video and plenty of ads, it becomes terrible.

You can follow me on Twitter - and just maybe we might become friends.

People love to give away their usernames and passwords. That's the only explanation why I receive so many invitations from them to give away my personal data as well.

Common sense, a bit of questioning, the news, sometimes friends, parents, tech and support departments, they all warn us every day about the dangers of certain emails and web sites. Nevertheless, such black holes of personal data are so strong that many can't escape their gravity. Think of it like the fly that cannot escape the blue light that means certain death.

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I admit it: I am an email receiver. I do receive emails, some more and some less important, daily. Occasionally, I even send some. Nowadays, one almost dares not to tell anyone about it because of the flood of unwanted emails arriving minutes after the world knows someone's email address, or even just the domain name. Holding a couple of domain names on my own mail server, I noticed a couple of odd things and I met 2 new friends.

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There are many neighbors online, be it in virtual worlds like Second Life, social web sites like MySpace, shared interests in user groups or bookmark entries. These places offer great opportunities to get in touch and learn more about others and all is just a click away. Instead of the usual friend lists and random suggestions, why not click the strangers immediately around you?

Say you publish something in a service like Twitter, then go to the page listing all recent posts and follow up on the people immediately behind and ahead of your own post. You never know what and who you could find this way; a surprise at every click.