But it's also dead simple easy, which is why I like it.

For your luddites who aren't hep to the consultant-mandated inevitability of Web 2.0, Twitter is like the world's smallest weblog system (in fact, people have already coined the phrase "nanoblogging," just to piss me off.) Once you have an account, you can instantly add tiny little updates - no more than 140 characters - to your Twitter weblog. It's marketed as "here's what I'm doing right now," but really it's like a chat room with no one in it but yourself.

You get a page on Twitter's servers, plus the ability to incorporate it into your own stuff via Flash or javascript. The main Twitter site lets you tag other friends with Twitter accounts and collate faux "conversation" pages that list everything your friends have posted.

So I've added my own Twitter widget to the main fourhman.com page. It may or may not stick, depending on its reliability. Strangely, the Twitter-supplied code seems to hate Internet Explorer (jesus! What is it with that crap?), but it looks fantastic in Safari. Even hoary old Netscape likes it. I'm fairly certain it's a CSS subtlety thats wrecking it here, but since I don't use CSS (NOW who's the luddite!), I have no idea what to do about it.

Anyway, what makes Twitter work is that everything is focused on you being able to issue updates, small though they be, from anywhere. I attached my account to my phone's Instant Messenger... so no matter where I am, I can push a quick no-programming miniature site update. Yeah, yeah, I can use Movable Type on my awesome phone, but there's something to be said for making the process totally transparent: I IM Twitter and the text goes live. Wonderful. Most of the time.

You can also publish via text messaging, but I never use those, since I have, as you know from the previous paragraph, an awesome phone.

That said, Twitter is the dumbest bit of internet forced-trend I've seen in a long time. (Since all those flash animations that play a calm waterfall scene and then quick-cut to a man's gaping asshole or whatever, actually.) Twitter is, in pure utility, more useless than MySpace. At least with MySpace, you can pretend you have a real website where pals can post pictures and comments, even of you can't hold a goddamn coherent conversation on your own smegging page. With Twitter, it's just an endless litany of "having lunch with Dan" and "gas prices very high this week so I shoplifted a muffin." Twitter feels like a beta.

Although, to be fair, Twitter looks much better than MySpace, which is partially why I'm sure I'll use it more often. Design is everything, and MySpace looks like the 1997 internet jumped ahead in time to somehow kill the 2007 internet in an evil quest for dominance.

For my purposes - speaking as somebody with a real website and everything - Twitter is just a cute sidebar feature. We'll see how long it lasts, which, as I said, hinges mainly on the damn code not melting on Windows machines.