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This is yet another post that started on a forum and I thought it would be quite good here as well. I’m also currently writing part two of my Twitter guide; it should be up in the next few days.

I’ve been mentioning Twitter on all sort of forums and I’m not too great at explaining why I like it or why I think people should use it.

This explains it quite well:

After a certain point Twitter becomes part of the background to life.

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in the café of my favourite bookshop with my partner. She was reading about the Habsburgs, Hitler and Weimar while I was writing a talk about the future of publishing.

But I was also engaged in a distributed dialogue with a bunch of friends around the world,

BrightMeadow was cold and complaining, so I sympathised. Luke invited me to look at the first release of his new site, while sambrook was happy to discuss media futures and help me with my talk.

I was there in the cafe but also in this liminal space with everyone else, reading lovemaus’s comments on Casablanca, sympathising with technokitten stuck at Madrid airport and wondering whether Jeff went for his run on a chilly New York morning.

Thanks to Twitter I carry my online networks with me as I wander through town, and more and more I see the world through the lens of our shared experience.

Sanjukta is in a cafe in Delhi and here with me; I am wondering what Documentally is filming in Rugby; I know that Yuko42 is lying in bed listening to the Tokyo rain.

And this one:

The appeal of Twitter – and the thing that has persuaded me to spend more time there than on other social networks – is that it distills the essence of Facebook and chucks away most of the annoying stuff.

I’d long tired of all the poking, vampires, SuperWalls and countless applications which cluttered up what was once a clean interface. What I still value is the status updates which allow me to see at a glance what my friends – and distant acquaintances – are up to, and that is what I get on Twitter.

And that pretty much sums up Twitter for me, it’s something that is in the background and provides me with an update on what other people are up to. It’s the ability to be in casual contact with people all over the world without having a full IM conversation or an email.

Like earlier I had a guy from Germany tweet about his lunch including a photo of said lunch, a guy living in India tweeting on how he missed his bus and a woman living in the same town as me mention an accident that happened in town centre.

Or people linking to something they find interesting and conversations about anything really. At this moment there is a conversation about female gamers, an ongoing thing about rick rolling, a discussion about which cashpoints [ATM's] are the best and quickest, and a few links to the London election and a big German scandal involving Lidl supermarkets amongst the people I am following.

When I recently tried to figure out on which hand a married man wears his wedding ring I had over twenty replies within minutes. Thank you all for that. Whoever wants to know, this is the result:

Plus some hilarious tweets, such as Wil Wheaton’s travelling [read from bottom to top]:

Or completely random ones, such as this one which I’m hoping has some context!

It is quite worrying!

If you are using Twitter, why are you using it?