I don’t get Twitter.

And it’s not just because I’m a long-winded bastard, though that’s definitely true. (I can remember my elementary school days, when I’d come back to face another school year after a glorious summer of building rockets, tinkering with electronics, and shunning my peers, and the teacher would ask us to write a 250 word essay about what we did over summer vacation. “Two hundred and fifty words!” I’d wail. “How can I ever write two hundred and fifty words??!“. Nowadays, two hundred and fifty words isn’t even enough to write the introduction to what I did last weekend. But I digress.)

It’s more that I don’t really understand what the value is in sending out regular blips to the world explaining what I’m doing. It seems to me that if I’m doing something interesting, like tying someone to the bed and fisting her, I’m unlikely to stop what I’m doing to Twitter about it (and wouldn’t you really rather read the full version later, anyway?), and if what I’m doing allows me to stop and Twitter about it, it probably isn’t very interesting. “Waiting for potatoes to boil,” for example. (Which is, honestly, what I’m doing right now. figmentj has drafted me to help with the Thanksgiving cooking; those of you who know my cooking skills are probably reeling in stark raving terror right about now. But again, I digress.)

It seems to me that Twitter is really only ideal for those times when you’re doing something interesting but you also can type about it on your cell phone, and I can’t think of very many cases like that. Falling out of a burning airplane, maybe:

Mixed blessing. Survived the explosion, but…

Wow. Sure is cold. The ground is very far away.

Falling faster now. 9.8m/sec2 is a bitch.

hard 2 type. hands stiff. lots of wind.

kthxbai.

So, those of you who use Twitter, what am I missing?