‘To twitter’ gets a new meaning that has nothing to do with birds

There are more than 540 000 words in the English language. This is apparently about five times more than during Shakespeare’s time. Among the many new words or meanings fighting to get accepted on to the hallowed pages of the Oxford English Dictionary would be “twittering”, and that would not involve birds.

It was early February of this year that I was introduced to a demonstration of Twitter and the verb “to twitter”. It was the occasion of the Twitter Tea Party that made me realise that this little bit of software, running on the internet or on a phone near you, seemed to have a future.

The Twitter Tea Party was being held at our house and was a celebration of the fact that we had all survived the festive season and the subsequent Christmas sales and were ready to face the new year. Everybody brought cake and most participants brought their computers as well. No self-respecting geek leaves home without one.

During this festive occasion, the Twitter site was open on most of the computers with conversations being tracked and responded to while munching through a huge pile of cake. In fact, the entire happening, from walking to our house, cake consumption and socialising to leaving and arriving at home again, was shared with the Twitter community.

At this point, it might be an idea to expand a little on what Twitter is. It is the quintessential micro-blogging service. No message may be longer than 140 characters. Definitely short-story time here. The Twitter website acts like a clearing house. All messages are routed via the site and one may pick up the conversation either via the site or SMSed to one’s cellphone.

There are variations on this service, of course. One particular nice feature is that one can set up temporary Twitter communities with whom to share special occasions. This would apply to such events as conferences, political rallies or even family celebrations. All it requires to work would be participants. And to go big, the actual Twitter page could be streamed on to a huge wall with the help of a data projector. That’s sharing for you.

This kind of sharing of all things important and trivial with other people who are not necessarily friends but could purely be following one another — almost a case of stalking, one could surmise — was something to which I couldn’t really relate. I vaguely asked the group who would want to know that I was now consuming a muffin, and the chorus back was: “I would.” Wow.

So I signed up for a Twitter account shortly thereafter. As with all of these networking sites available, one needs to work at them, which is something I haven’t done. Nine months down the line I have four people I follow and seven followers on Twitter. Miss Popularity? Not. There just seemed no reason to want to find out what kind of muffin people were eating or where they were going to have a mid-morning cup of coffee.

But then, I think, I am totally missing the point here. It’s not about the muffin or the cup of coffee. It’s all about sharing a simple human action that is watched by others and responded to that makes one feel part of a community. Facebook on the hoof, so to speak.

In the fragmented world that we live in, where there is no job or home security, where relationships might not last that long, or your favourite techie tools are obsolete within a few months, it is really reassuring to know that there are people out there who want to share with you the ordinary bits of life. It is almost as if this easy communication, in 140 characters or fewer, provides a stability that other parts of our life don’t any more.

To add to this insight, yesterday I found out about the really useful side of Twitter. We had a meeting arranged at London’s Canary Wharf. From Brighton this is a convoluted, two-hour-long journey — one way. It occurred to us to Twitter to see how public transport was measuring up. Lo and behold, a broken-down train and emergency repair services were blocking the stretch between Brighton and Gatwick, causing up to 90 minutes’ delay.

Thus warned, the way around that was to take the car to Gatwick. The website for the train service would have carried that delay on page three, if at all; in other words, nobody would have considered checking.

Is this a sign of the times, to have a fairly popular communications tool — growing as we speak — that only allows a maximum of 140 characters per message? Do we only have time for such short bursts of communication and does that not make our lives seem the poorer for it?

Or perhaps it is only really an indication of the way we want to communicate and that is in abbreviated text messages. A tool pops up that allows us to do just that and is an extension of the text messaging used on cellphones. Whatever the social reasoning behind the phenomena of micro-blogging, I have decided that I want to become a Twitterer. So, who can I follow?