Dave's Fiction Warehouse

Perhaps signaling the imminent demise of Twitter, the Wall Street Journal has posted a guide for using it. The guide runs 1,200 words and does a good job of explaining why this is something you may not want to bother with. Whenever I see the phrase "social-networking tool," my eyes glaze over. Not that I mind Twitter. I've been on it for a couple of months. I now follow 13 people. I am being followed by 33, which is weird because my "updates" tend to be non sequiturs, and infrequent enough to render my ranking just short of nonexistent. I never look at my Twitter ranking, of course. I'm much too cool for that. My own guide for using Twitter is this: Don't follow anyone you haven't had dinner with. But know that following friends will make you immediately and exquisitely aware of every party to which you've not been invited. Finally, while it's easy to follow someone, it's not so simple to quit. Thanks to a dopey service called Qwitter , ...

I was on the Internet long before AOL, embraced e-mail in its infancy, put up a few web pages when you still had to know some basic HTML to do it. I've had online photo albums for years, I'm still slogging away with this dumb blog and I even flirted briefly with Facebook. So I don't consider myself some kind of Andy Rooney luddite, still scratching my head over the Zip Code system. But I still don't get Twitter . If you don't know what Twitter is, fine. Perhaps we are kindred spirits and let's just enjoy this moment. If you do, that's fine too. I come not to judge. Because really, my thinking on this is mixed. We already have the attention spans of Mediterranean fruit flies, and I'm not 100 percent sold on on anything that makes them even shorter. On the other hand, who has time, what with gas prices and the war in Iraq, to put together complete sentences? Twitter asks nothing in this regard and gives much. You riff about about what you're doing, an...