I'm trying to understand everyone's recent obsession with Twitter.  In case you've missed it, Twitter is a microblogging service that allows its users to post frequent, brief updates on their lives.  When I say brief, I mean 140 characters or less.  This blog entry is already twice that length, so you can see the level of brevity they're going for here.  Basically, according to Twitter's site, the goal is to have available at all times the answer to the question, "What am I doing?" 

In addition to constantly updating your status, you can "follow" your friends by subscribing to their twitter feed and getting constant updates on what they're doing.  For example, right now I see that one of my clients is "getting ready for a meeting," that pseudo-internet celebrity Kevin Rose "just got home from a full day of work", and that Barack Obama is "holding a discussion on energy policy in Las Vegas, NV."  Meanwhile, Jay is "twittering on twitter about [his] blog, which is about blogging and twittering."  Try to wrap your mind around that one.

In many circles, Twitter has been hailed as a brilliant new social networking tool that is here to stay, and not just the latest MySpace or Facebook.  Some have even claimed that the forced-brevity factor will help us learn how to be more effective and concise in our communications, turning us into better writers.  Perhaps I'm getting to that certain age where new technology is confusing and newfangled, but I'm just not getting it.  We have email, we have instant messaging, we have blogs, and we have all of these things on our computers, phones and oftentimes our TVs.  Is anyone really having that much trouble keeping current on their friends' lives?  Or is it just about an easier way to do what we've been doing since the inception of the Internet?  

Maybe we just haven't gone far enough.  If a 140 character limitation is better than full-on blog posting -- if constant and centralized updates on our lives are the next evolution of communications -- maybe we need to run with this and move on to the next logical step.  That's why today I'm introducing my own personal nanoblog.  Instead of quick, 140 character updates, I'm going to keep you updated with super quick, two word updates on my day.  Instead of a sentence or two every couple of hours, you'll get a simple grunt every couple of minutes.  Now that's communication!

So head on over to http://nano.andy.teamsoell.com to get the latest on my day.  There's even a handy RSS feed so you never have to not know exactly what I'm doing RIGHT NOW.