“Walked to work today for the first time in months. Had forgotten how nice it is to listen to podcasts in solitude.”

That 116 character statement doesn’t really deserve a blog entry of its own. But ever since I got the hang of Twitter, I’ve been posting things like that all the time. Not just posting, but responding to other people’s little snippets, and even having whole conversations. Twitter is a broadcast messaging tool that limits posts to 140 characters. Some people call it a “microblog.” It is different than blogging in that it is easy to update via IM or SMS from your phone, and messages that other people post can be broadcast back out by those same media.

It took me a while to figure out how to use Twitter, to understand what sort of conversations it is good for, but now the constantly popping up messages throughout the day generally serve to amuse, occasionally enlighten, and frequently keep me informed about random minutia in other people’s lives — minutia that I could just as well do without, but its sort of fun to see what people are up to.

Twitter is also assisting my quest to write more cogently: with only 140 characters at your disposal, it is important to be brief. Twitter isn’t for everyone, and I sympathize with many who don’t see the point of it. But I’m having fun with it. For now.