“Hi, my name is MeL, and I’m slowly becoming a twitterholic.”

If you don’t understand what this means, don’t worry about me, it’s nothing serious. But you’re obviously not affected yet by the latest Web 2.0 feature: Twitter. Or – like me – you’re still a beginner and not accustomed to the language of the twitterverse yet. Because Twitter seems to have created a whole new language, and there are still times when I’m desperately looking for a dictionary. By now, I’ve learned that the updates are called “tweets”, that some Twitter users call each other “tweeple”, that RT means that you’re repeating someone else’s tweet (RT = re-tweet?), and that if you refer to someone’s profile, you but an “@” in front of his or her username, like, for example, mine: @everythingmel. But I’m still not sure whether the right verb is “to twitter” or “to tweet”.

But what is Twitter? According to Wikipedia, Twitter “is a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets”. Sounds boring? Apparently not to the millions of users who already do just that: tell people what they’re doing, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It seems like it’s THE thing at the moment, everybody’s talking about it, everybody’s writing about it, everybody tweets (or twitters?). And it’s not just about ordinary people letting their friends know what they’re doing anymore, and not just some celebrities you might have heard about, like Britney Spears (@britneyspears) and Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk), who feed their fans’ appetite for news about them. Newspapers, TV shows, internet websites, even politicians use Twitter to connect to their readers, customers, voters. Barack Obama (@BarackObama) used Twitter during last year’s election campaign, and you can even follow his opponent John McCain on Twitter, too (@SenJohnMcCain). And the No. 1 on the list of top twitter users as compiled by twitterholic.com is not even a person – it’s CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk).

Of course, Twitter has also found its way into the lesbian community. eurOut is on Twitter (@eurOut), as are its editors (@SandraShowtime, @Natazzz, @maxime68), and AfterEllen.com (@afterellen) just dedicated a whole new feature called “TwitterWatch” to the new phenomenon.

What I like about Twitter as compared to, for example, social networks like Facebook or Xing, is that I can stay much more anonymous and private if I want to. I can choose whatever name I want to in order to create a profile, and I can protect my tweets if I want to. Because even after years of creating and writing for websites and blogs and being a moderator for an internet message board, I’m still careful about publishing details of my private life, especially my name or pictures of me, on the internet, and I’m constantly amazed by how willingly people make those things available for everyone to see, even if they don’t have to. They use their real name and a picture of them on their Twitter profile, and – without hesitation – write about very private stuff like their newest crush and their latest fight with their boyfriend, girlfriend, partner, husband, wife or even their boss. And as you cannot hide who you’re following on Twitter or who’s following you ­– unlike your tweets – people even reveal their sexual identity. Sure, there are probably a lot of straight people (or tweeple) who follow Rachel Maddow (@maddow) or Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow), but if you add eurOut, AfterEllen, lesbian blogger Dorothy Snarker (@dorothysnarker) or out comedian Liz Feldman (@Lizinhollywood) to the mix, it becomes pretty obvious, doesn’t it?

It might not sound like that, but I AM a big fan of social networks, I think that they can be very useful. For example, I use Facebook to stay in touch with my friends in the U.S., where Facebook is so much more popular already than over here in Europe, I’ve met some great people through a queer group on Xing and only last week I even could use Twitter for my day job. It’s just that I think that those networks should come with a label that says “Handle with care!” so that there’s no bad awakening. For example, it’s a known fact that firms and headhunters who are recruiting people check the social networks for profiles of their candidates, and I’m sure that by now, Twitter is on their list as well.

But if we apply some caution, I think that there’s no need to shy away from those websites. After all, they’re are not only useful, but just too much fun to not use them.

So what are you waiting for?

Posted on eurOut on March 28th, 2009