For the past couple of weeks, everyone has been losing their minds over Twitter. If you haven't seen it, it's a web app where people are supposed to frequently answer the question, "What are you doing?" so their Twitter friends can follow along. The practical effect is that thousands of people post short blurbs like "waiting for lunch" or "bored, want to go home." In other words, it appears to be largely pointless. And yet, people are obsessed with the thing. What I am trying to discover is why.

In an effort to give the thing a fair shake, I created a tRJ account. My genius idea was to create a tRJ tracker; I travel a bit and occasionally do assorted interesting things, so I thought it might make an interesting feature. But Twitter is insanely slow; having the script on the page prevents the entire sidebar from loading until Twitter gets its act together. So that idea is out.

And so I set to reading other people's thoughts on the app, hoping for some inspiration. And then, I found it: some user posts random activities as though s/he were Darth Vader (e.g. "On Endor. I hate trees."). And s/he has attracted a number of followers—Vader's the #7 most-watched user at the moment—simply by being funny.

So I think, at least for my own amusement, the best way to use Twitter is to slightly alter the rules of the game. At any given moment, what I'm doing would be uninteresting to everyone who isn't my Mom. And in the long-term, it makes no impact. Why would someone want to process and retain that knowledge?

What people do retain is trivial information; communication amongst my peers is strongly dependent on that fact (e.g. you all know what "sacrilicious" is). And if I'm updating Twitter, I'm sitting at the computer, reading, learning.

And so my new genius idea was to create a user whose updates come in the form of trivia, where the trivia is whatever random things I learn while I am sitting around reading. It could be interesting, if random facts are your thing. I could also lose interest in the idea in the next 24 hours. Hard to say. For now, if you're on Twitter, feel free to start following the adventures of The 1400 cc Brain.

Update, Sept. 23, 2007: Well, I managed to sustain marginal interest until sometime in July. As of now, I am deleting my Twitter account.