I’ve played with lots of social networking tools, and Twitter is one of my favorites. Voyeurism & Egocentrism together at last!

My Twitter account is about 1.5 years old. I got really into it after I moved to So Cal, close to the first @FragDolls post on 7/31/2007.

@rhoulette has become one of my most regular outlets and sources of bizarre randomness, something I am now hopelessly addicted to.

When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is check up on my Twitter feed. I’m so used to this that I feel lonely without it.

Twitter’s simple interface makes it easy to update, and since it’s a super low hurdle for posting, that means there is a ton of fresh news.

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the flood of information and wonder if Twitter marks the beginning of the Too Much Information Age…

TMI is a topic for another day, however.

Back to the Twitter Love: there are several inherent things about Twitter’s design that make it beautifully awesome and strange all at once.

1st (& most obvious) side effect for me: I am now more comfortable writing in less than 140 letters than I am writing full paragraphs.

This writing habit will be considered totally fine when we eventually decide that Twitter = Haiku 2.0

Surprise benefit of the twitter character limit is that it puts a cap on my grad school habit of using stupidly giant words. Yay!

Aside from how my writing style is being deeply altered, Twitter is unique in how it provides a new outlet for our strange behaviors.

In Twitter, there is potentially an audience that wants (or at least reads) your answers to the perpetual question: how/what are you doing?

Equally as odd, you can become a member of an audience that wants (or at least reads) people’s thoughts on how/what they are doing.

We perform ourselves for each other in the way that we want our selves performed. This can be both telling and misleading.

On one hand, I know more about what goes on in the everyday life of @trixie360, for example, than I could ever know without Twitter.

On the other, I think I know what she’s been up to, but trixie only posts what she WANTS to. She might be an alien spy, but I wouldn’t know!

I sure as heck don’t post everything about myself. Example: I sing high pitched songs to my cats but no one knows because I don’t twitter it!

Another weird thing about Twitter is that I can only get updates from people with Twitter accounts. I love my twitter peeps, but…

Since there isn’t 100% adoption rate amongst my loved ones yet, I know more about what @majornelson did today than I do about my brother.

It’s an interesting way to get to know people, but I try to remember that I see more of their own self images than I see of the “real” them.

I sincerely like this aspect of Twitter, though. Every twitter we tweet adds to the performance art project that is our Twitterself.

For anyone who is curious about new social technology and has a few friends to follow, I recommend that you definitely give Twitter a whirl.

It’s weird and great and totally a trip. I could always use more Twitter friends to help me to figure out what’s really going on here.

I’m an anthropologist, after all. This weird social stuff is right up my alley.

If you’re not sure where to start, look up @rhoulette, @psychefd, and @fragdolls. We welcome you to the social experiment party!

P.S. @twitterverse: <3s!!!