Why I'll be fluttering soon

So today I came across this video on Slate.com by way of Twitter:

Obviously, everybody's been talking about Twitter lately.  People love it, hate it, are thoroughly confused by it, etc.  If you think about it, all those different reactions make sense, seeing as Twitter is really just an aggregated thought stream.  That is, a stream of a bunch of different people's thoughts all thrown together in chronological order.  I figure, people's normal thoughts cause all those reactions (see the comments on any Chronicle article), so why shouldn't a thought stream?

For a while I didn't really get it either, and I'll admit I still don't get it completely.  But if it's really just a collection of human thoughts, the fact is, none of us ever really stands a chance of "getting" it any more that we "get" the other ~6 billion people on the earth.  But we do it anyway because somewhere in the mix we get the satisfaction of interacting with other people, even if it's just by way of electrons.

Many people will say that it takes a level of self-importance that borders on narcissism to think that people want to follow your thoughts and opinions (and yes, I get the irony of saying that as a blogger/columnist...blolumnist...I like it).  But on the other hand, it's a pretty organic system, and it doesn't really matter what your assumptions are about yourself, because only other people can confirm them.  Which is why I have 11 followers, while Rainn Wilson (Dwight from "The Office," who I follow) has over 340k followers (a little cultish, no?) and thousands of people were disappointed this week to find out that Christopher Walken's twitter feed was a fake.

At the end of the day, Twitter just gives people what they want: People...in bite-sized portions of 140 characters or less.  And whenever somebody finds another effective way to distribute people to people, their product will take off too.  It won't matter whether it's Flutter or Shttr (<<you'll only get that if u watched the video) and most of us won't "get it."

On a related note, shameless self-promotion here.