@Original Andrew:
Heh.

At least now she’ll have time to start that graduate school program she’s always wanted to drop out of.

According to almost son-in-law, Levi, Simple Sarah needs bucks plain and, uh, simple. No filthy lucre if she’s sucking at Alaska’s gobbiment teats.

No, wait, that was a month ago.

Functionally, Twitter is an online text-messaging service. You post short messages to your account, and others “following” you can read them, and reply if desired.

It was originally pitched in ValleySpeak as “microblogging,” and in StinqueSpeak as The Latest Sign of the Apocalpyse — everyone was encouraged to write what they were doing at that moment, as if anyone really cares that I’m dumping a sweet deuce right now.

But when the Iran regime throttled the Internet last month, low-overhead Twitter messages were about the only way to get news out the country — the U.S. even asked Twitter to reschedule some critical maintenance so it was overnight Tehran time.

Closer to home, I’ve repurposed (burp) the Stinque Twitter account to post headlines from the site, with links — and also to mess around there more. Folks who follow our account, but don’t regularly visit the site itself, now have little prompts throughout the day. That’s a practical use — Twitter as ad hoc wire service — that I hadn’t considered before.

And then there’s Twitter as Massive Comment Thread, when everyone plays around with a subject like “first-draft movie lines”, and “tags” their tweets accordingly. Just the latest casual time-waster in that guise, but for me it’s nice to see what Mark Lisanti (Defamer) and Ana Marie Cox (Wonkette) are up to without making a special effort.