I’ve been following the discussions and debates about Twitter for quite a while now, and I set up an account about six months ago. However, I never actually used it — so telling someone that I “understand” Twitter is sort of like telling my wife that I understand what childbirth is all about. Not that I’m trying to equate Twitter with childbirth, but you get the idea … So I decided to spend a few minutes this evening actually connecting myself to a few other individuals, and typing in the appropriate commands to “follow” them — i.e., receive updates on my cell phone’s text-message service whenever they feeling like twittering about their current activities.

The most immediate problem is that hardly anyone on my real-world “network” participates in Twitter. None of my personal friends, nobody in my immediate family (I’m sure my kids wouldn’t have told me if they were Twittering, so I had to search for them to see), none of my clients, none of my erstwhile business colleagues. Well, that’s not completely true: I did find two of my professional colleagues — people who are deeply immersed in Web 2.0 and social networking — and I’m now “following” them. Just for the heck of it, I also decided to follow three of the 2008 Presidential candidates.

And to my enormous surprise, somebody is following me on Twitter. Someone I don’t know, someone I don’t think I’ve ever met. According to his picture, he looks like a college student. Or maybe a geek programmer. If I were paranoid, maybe I would find this worrying; but for now, I merely find it curious. (In addition, one of the Presidential candidates is supposedly following my activities; I can’t believe that’s true, since I’ve never contributed a penny to any political candidate … still, it’s interesting.)

Aside from the fact that — at least for now — I have almost no one to talk (twitter) to, and nobody (except one lonely geek) is interested in talking/twittering to me, I have a more fundamental question: what would I twitter about? Does anyone care that my train to Philadelphia was 15 minutes late this morning, or that the air-conditioning was broken on the Acela train back to New York? For that matter, does anyone care that I was going to Philadelphia? Does anyone even care about Philadelphia at all? I’m willing to give it a try, and I’m inclined to try it with as much open-minded enthusiasm as I can muster. After all, there was a long period when none of my friends, family, clients, or business colleagues had e-mail either. And there was a long period of time that my friends, family, clients, and business colleagues thought the World Wide Web was a short-term fad.

I’m also interested in seeing whether some “serious” applications of Twittering and micro-blogging evolve over time. To get an interesting perspective on this, take a look at Luis Suarez’s recent blog, “Twitter and the Power of Micro-Blogging in Emergencies.”

So if you’re a Twitterer, and you have something interesting to Twitter about — or think I should be following your every move — let me know … and I’ll let you know what I think of all of this, as time goes on…