A while ago, I posted about the very useful tool that I believe Twitter to be. Obviously, based on the comments, most of you still don't get why it is worth a try, or how it is different from the other social networks. Let me see if I can address that with this post.

The real difference in Twitter and the other social networks like Facebook is that it is portable. There is a facebook mobile, meaning I can use it on my phone. But Twitter can be fully experienced from a non-internet phone that gets SMS. (If you don't have to pay for individual texts.) Although my favorite way to use twitter on my phone is using betwittered.com/m. Also, with a camera phone you can post pictures just like sending MMS.

Even on your computer, it is portable. If I use twhirl, I never even have to visit the twitter.com website and I still see all my friends' tweets and am able to post my own. As much as I love RSS, it is not two-way like twhirl.

Facebook, myspace et al, are all about your profile, Twitter is about the updates. In fact, you only get a very barebones profile on twitter. It is assumed that you know who you are following .

Twitter is a bit like an IM to multiple people all at once. So if I'm driving home, I can update people in NC and KY all at the same time. Everyone can know when I arrive and when I left. And all my followers who just don't ccare, they can disregard those twitters. We have all become very good at ignoring what we re not interested in. I'll prove it. Look at your inbox right now. You will see 3 categories of things there, stuff that gets immediately deleted because you don't care, stuff you are genuinely interested in that you will take the time to read, and stuff that you only have a mild interest in that you will glance over but give no real thought to. Your twitterfeed is like that.

There is one more twitter-related post coming. It will be tomorrow, then I'll try to get back to blogging about more substantive things like fishing.