Twitter and me go a long way back. Okay, not too long. I’ve been tweeting for about four months. I turned to Twitter out of an encroaching boredom with the other social networking giant–Facebook. I had grown accustomed to Facebook, then familiar, then pretty much blind to everything I did there. Online became a substitute for television–long minutes, then hours, of passive dithering.

Then I discovered Twitter. Back in the day, I had been an IRC devotee, spending long, late-night hours conversing with strangers. The conversations ranged from the banal and forgettable, to the profound and life-changing. Sometimes, I would run the gamut from mind-numbing silliness to philosophical rapture all in one evening. With Twitter, I started feeling some of the attraction to the same sort of online activity I had truly enjoyed with IRC chat almost a decade ago.

The familiar # sign (called hashmarks in Twitter parlance) were familiar, and denoted channel names on Twitter, much the way they did with IRC. The content of Twitter, too, ranged from ordinary to intellectually challenging. And the elegance of using 140 characters or less–characters not words, mind you–I found fascinating, and still do.

The challenge of expressing oneself, let alone conveying very basic information, micro-blogging style, was a craft that I became hungry to practice. Even as I learned more about the technicalities of Twitter, I became more and more enamored of the discipline of being in the information stream, and responding to its ripples and torrents, as I once was with conducting multiple calculations on many IRC channels simultaneously. The information overload was transfixing and transforming.

This evening, after I  blog, I will go back to Twitter briefly. It’s Thursday evening, and I always try to do my #FollowFridays on Thursday night. If you have Twittered for more than a couple of months, you have probably learned about #FollowFriday.  It’s a Twitter activity that several hundred thousand Tweeple (Twitter+people)  engage in every week. It consists in tweeting “shout outs” to all your followers, usually your new followers. You’re nothing on Twitter if you’re not Followed and Mentioned, so the #FollowFriday mentions of your new followers is an end-of-week ritual that many play. I always feel on “FollowFridays” (which I do on Thursday, as I mentioned), like I’m paying it forward. A FollowFriday mention is like a random act of kindness. I always try to mention someone in my group of followers that’s just starting out on Twitter, and perhaps doesn’t have many followers of their own.

I encourage any of you that is looking for a new hobby, and especially those that love computers and technology–give Twitter a try! There’s a bit of learning curve, but Twitter is pretty intuitive. So, even if you don’t get the engineers perspective, and don’t have the patience to learn the peculiar system that is Twitter, you should enjoy yourself, and in the process have many enjoyable  new friendships, virtually.