All you've got is twitter...

What itf all you had was twitter.

What if in some future world all you had was your cell phone, and the only information you could get about anything came from twitter.  

In that futuristic vision of the far off future you don't read newspapers, or magazines or watch TV anymore, everything you know, everything you care about comes in short 140 character squished sentences.

Wait, sorry, that's not the future that's every under 26 year old on the planet.
So, just for fun, let's pretend we're one of the in twit crowd, and see what we'd have learned about today March 23rd, 2009. No fair going anywhere else on the web.

Okay, so I look on my iphone at the twitter site and they show me the top 10 words being ‘tweeted' right at that moment.  These are what everyone is tweeting about, from my screen to yours:

1.  Dow
2.  #tedxusc,
3.  #musicmonday
4.  ExecTweets
5.  Steve Harvey
6.  Oprah
7.  Jennifer Aniston
8.  AT&T
9.  John Mayer
10.  Twilight.

Now, that looks like a screwy sort of a list.

#1 Top one's easy.  Frist tweet I read says ‘Dow up nearly 500 on Bank Plan'.  Second says ‘that should give the Aussie dollar a kick in the right direction. Top work yanks!'

Now what's with those ‘#' symbols in #2 and #3?  Well, since we're in the in crowd we would have known that the pound symbols are called ‘hashtags' (great word huh?).  What they do is let you ‘tag' things that you think are important so that everyone can follow the conversation about that topic.  Otherwise the conversation would get lost amongst the millions of tweets.

#2 So, let's click on  #tedxusc and see what's up.  This must be a music conference, lots of references to Melissa Ethridge and some Muslim blues player, and I'm guessing it's at USC, since some kids are talking about ditching class....

#3 musicmonday.  This being Monday, and the tweets being all about different songs, I'm guessing everyone posts their favorite songs once a week.  Didn't learn much about the world here, but did find a couple of new good songs.

#4 This appears to be a new service that was launched by Microsoft and Federated Media, seems like you can follow top business types tweeting.  Also looks like a number of twitterers were paid to tweet about it.... Hmm probably won't go there.

#5 Steve Harvey

#6 Oprah.  These last two go together, it appears that Harvey appeared on Oprah and has written a book.  That's about all you'll find out.

#7 Jennifer Aniston.  Apparently she just broke off her relationship with her boyfriend John Mayer because he was obsessed with twitter.

#8 AT&T Tech rumors here.  AT&T is predicted to come out with a new faster iphone mid-june, and maybe a new apple 3G netbook.

#9 See #7

#10  Twilight.  This appears to be about the movie based on the book. Not sure why it's number 10, I might guess that the movie or DVD just came out?  You'll learn that gratefulheart went on an afternoon movie date with Dyane to see it, and that bjenny is watching it with her baby sister.

So there you have it.  Now, on the surface of it, it seems rather shallow, thin, silly, limited, uninteresting, frivolous, trivial, obtuse, pointless, Hollywood obsessed, self-centered, and repetitive, but it isn't... oh wait maybe it is.  

But in a weird way that's the point of twitter.  It's all about communicating not what you're communicating.  It's about being the first to point something out to a friend (or pseudo friend), or being able to make a comment about something that everyone else is talking about, and seeing your message being passed along, or just posting something to see if anyone is around to chat with.... We are really are an incredibly lonely bunch of mammals...