Twitter: What's the deal?

Twitter.com has been a fun find for me on the Internet. If you aren't familiar with it, Twitter is sort of like instant messaging, but it is typically used to broadcast little posts about your thoughts and activities. The messages are limited to about 160 characters like a text message on your cell phone. In fact, if you like, you can choose to post your "tweets" from your cell phone and have your friends' "tweets" forwarded to your cell phone as text messages. Perfect, if you don't have any REAL online friends to swap text messages with. While some of the tweets I receive are merely links to peoples' traditional blog posts, others are more spontaneous, sometimes funny, sometimes opportunistic. Woot! for example, will bombard you with the deal of the day if you so choose (beware when they decide to have a woot!-off, however). The real joy for me is the opportunity that Tweet provides to interact more immediately and collaboratively with some of my favorite bloggers. So, if all this sounds too nerdy for you, then Twitter may not be your cup of tea. After all, if you are like the Taxman's off-spring, you've got about all the text messaging you can handle. For me, however, Twitter is the right amount of online interactivity.