Twitter the 21st Century Telegraph.

I should probably just forget about twitter and move on. In the super information age do we really need to reinvent the telegraph?

All twitter really is, is the telegraph, the telegraph without purpose, and the cool sounds. Do we need a telegraph on the information super highway?

Do we need to send a very short message, forget about the art of writing, just send the information? It's the telegraph, except now everyone can send the messages, no telegraph operators, no wires, just tweets; so everyone tweets, great world changing messages, messages like I love bagels.

Sorry it's breakfast time and bagels sound good. I think you know what I mean though do we really need to send the tweets about everything?

My first take on twitter was not to bother. I have no need for the telegraph, unless of course it made the really cool noises and I could end every line with the word stop.

I also don't want to be a curmudgeon, so I kept thinking about it. And I kept coming across it. Which got me to try it again.

I've been on a political jag lately, so I thought I'd tweet about politics. It's been an interesting challenge. Making something meaningful fit in 140 characters or less.

I wanted to write something about the BP oil spill. I wanted to ask:

Why the hell is anyone shocked by the oil spill? It seems to be the status quo. Big multinational companies do what ever it takes to make money, that's their job. They'd sell grandmas if there was a market for grandma selling. So why are people shocked that BP cut corners, and created this mess. It's a lot cheaper for them to pay a few fines and stick the tax payer with the clean up than to actually fix the problem before it happens. It's their business model and it makes them billions every year.

That's what I wanted to tweet, but the big red numbers said I was -362. What? 362 useless characters including spaces. Of course that was total bull shit and twitter and tweeting suck.

I decided to play with the tweet, just to see if I could get the same idea out in so few words. Here's what I came up with.

Shocked by the BP spill? The purpose of a mega corp is money - it will make decisions in the interest of money - not public interests.

I think it actually got my point across, but I had to lose the grandma joke. It was a bad day in the history of grandma jokes, but an interesting day as a writer. I could get my message across in very few words, without losing the message.

I know even though I tweeted, no one read the tweet. In the tweetosphere there are more important things, than the BP oil spill, like bagels and marketing. Not having an audience has never stopped me from writing though, and now it won't stop me from tweeting.

I'm still not sure I get twitter, the 21st century telegraph, but I think maybe twitter has a purpose as a writing tool, at least for me.