If you don’t already know, Twitter is a silly little site that you update with 140 character (think text message length) “tweets”. They are generally inane little things–akin to the status messages on Facebook–but once you get a critical mass of friends in on it the site becomes pretty fun. And it can be useful, too–you can update it via text message, and you can set it up to have other people’s updates sent to your cell phone, so that you can keep up with your friends’ whereabouts when you’re away from the internet (e.g., Friday night at the bar).

For me, though, the greatest use is keeping up with people without phone calls/emails/telegrams. I like knowing what my friends in other cities are up to, but I’m a pretty crappy one-on-one correspondent. So I keep up best with friends who have blogs and/or twitter–all I have to do is check Google Reader or Twitter to see what’s new with dozens of people. It’s lazy, perhaps, but it works. And since clearly most of you are never going to start blogging, my best hope is that you’ll start twittering.

Now, I should warn you, despite its simplicity, Twitter is not necessarily easy to get into. At first, especially when you don’t have many friends on it, it seems like a serious waste of time. But if you stick with it for a week or two, I think you’ll come around–and the more of you that give it a shot, the better it’ll be.

C’mon, people. Get on Twitter. It’s time.

You can find my tweets @calamityjake.