Rockin' robin, tweet tweet tweet

Some people would call me a Luddite, I think I have even done so myself, but in fact I believe I exercise a healthy questioning pragmatism, albeit cynically, towards new technology.

My kitchen is more wooden spoon than multi-chef, I use separate tools for phone calls or photographs, I prefer to open the car window than use the air-conditioning and I listen to the radio.

So I haven’t exactly rushed on board the hurtling Twitter train.

Sure I’ve read the recent article in Time Magazine claiming that Twitter will change my life, I’ve listened to the views of friends and I look at all the articles that are printed explaining how disasters become newsworthy on the twitwork way before they hit the newsstands.

But.

I guess what I hate is that my species are so unquestioning in face of aggressive, well-planned marketing.

My baseline is the question – does it let me do anything that I couldn’t do before?

Or –was I walking around saying, damm I wish I had a way of sending out 140 character updates on what I am doing?

Anyhow I have signed up for an account, it just hasn’t seemed necessary to use it yet.

If you are reading this and are a twitterite could you explain to me?

1. What is the difference between a twitter and that annoying bit in Facebook pages that say what you are doing now?
2. Is sending a tweet any different than sending a text message to everyone in your mobile phone address book?
3. Why the creators of twitter are so arrogant that they believe they have a right to copyright the word Tweet?

The photo above is of pages 1330 and 1331 of my mother’s 1934 edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English.

It’s a beautiful book; it has convenient alphabetic indentations for easy access, a hard cover made of, granite I think and her name is neatly written on the inside.

It tells me that tweet was current English in 1934, before Jack Dorsey or Biz Jones were even breathing. It was the first word Krissie said this morning when she woke in the garden under the oak tree after another night bathed in Jupiter shine.

Do they really believe they invented the term?

Or is it just a way to get more publicity for something that seems, well, pretty underwhelming.?

It would, in a perfect world, be enough to cause me to boycott the whole thing and even write an angry post on blogger, which I think they also set up.

However what REALLY annoys me is how insanely difficult it is to sign up to the service.

I tried my usual names, topps, topper, popps – all taken.

I tried spelling them backwards, in double and even with multiple consonants – topppppppper – still, apparently taken.

I even tried “whyareyoumakingthissodifficultforme” as username only to be informed that that was already assigned to some poor shmuck!

Even “Idontbelieveyou”, “ohcomeoffityoumustbekidding” and “ihatetwittersguts” – are all being used by some idiot somewhere.