After a long and rocky start, I am happy to announce that Twitter and I are now going steady.

It wasn’t always destined to be this way. When I first heard of Twitter, my immediate reaction was “Oh God how horrific!”. Horrific both in the terms of privacy implications (Big Brother encouraging you to monitor your every move) and also “Man, has the internet sunk to a new low?”. I was prompted to think this by reading Twitter profiles which read “just got out of bed” or “man I have an itchy ass today!”. Reading comments like that made me wonder the value of Twitter and if there was anything truly to be gained by it. I mean,who gives a flying monkey if you’re sitting there contemplating whether to eat Weetabix or Crunchy Flakes? I don’t care and you don’t have to broadcast it online like it’s CNN Breaking News! As Bill Maher once pointed out, we have turned into a bunch of manical attention-seekers - we threw privacy out of the window years ago.

So I dismissed Twitter as just JAAW (Just Another Annoying Website) and moved onto a website with videos of dancing cats instead.

How wrong I was to dismiss them.

Instead of reading over the coming months about how Twitter crashed and burned, I instead read posts about how great Twitter was. I read how it was gaining strength and attracting new followers every day. My will wavered a bit and I thought about trying again but I decided not to. I was still convinced that Twitter was on a short life-span.

So what finally turned it around for me?

A combination of things. I guess it was mostly that I was finally starting to admit there might be something to this Twitter thing after all. I was starting to see that people were using Twitter for a variety of uses and not all of them were discussing their naval lint. Bloggers were using Twitter to publicise blog posts, others were using Twitter as “flash blogs” where they made thoughts that didn’t warrant its own full blog post. Some others were posting links to news stories. Fans were building Twitter apps by the dozen. You could even do “Ego Tweets” by searching for yourself or specific subjects on Twitter posts.

But what finally started to fascinate me was Twitter’s integration with instant messaging programs and mobile phones. With the IM programs, Twitter was re-defining the role of an IM program. Pre-Twitter, IM programs were for teenagers discussing who snogged who, old ladies exchanging cookie recipes and older men hitting on younger girls for tittie pictures. But Twitter came along and showed that you can use IM for other things, more productive things, such as getting relevant information pushed to your desktop. You can have the news headlines passed to you as a basic example. Steve Rubel touched on this in one of his blog posts in which he utilises both Twitter and Google Talk to have information flooding into his Gmail inbox.

And then the mobile phone. I have always been hesitant about combining a mobile phone with the internet because huge bills inevitably follow. When you mix the net with a phone, it’s like flushing big wads of cash down the toilet. It has always been a big mystery to me why mobile phone companies here in Germany do not drastically lower the charges to get online. Instead I am paying the equivalent of $2-$3 a minute if I want to get online with my mobile phone! Why the hell the phone companies can’t figure out “OK, if we lower the cost of getting online, we’ll get more customers who will surf the net more with our phones which means more cash for us”. I didn’t go to business school but even I can see that it makes sound business sense that if you lower the cost of something, more customers will come as a result. But everyone here seems to have graduated from the Kamikaze School of Business and Economics.

So when Twitter rolled out mobile integration at the cost of a SMS message to the United Kingdom, I was sold. Before, I would sit at social events and be bored witless. I would be building towers out of wineglasses and mentally undressing the waitresses. Now I just Twitter! I now sit there with my mobile phone under the table and I Twit about anything going through my mind at that given moment (internet / tech related). I can use the mobile SMS to switch my Twitter notifications on and off, send direct private messages to contacts (and have them directly contact me back). The only downside is that my hands are now extremely active under the table keying the next SMS and my girlfriend’s 80 year old grandfather naturally assumes that I am up to something disgusting down there that will get me prosecuted under the state’s obscenity laws. But it’s easier to let him think that than explain what Twitter is! He’s still in shock over the demise of the typewriter and we’ve only just got him understanding the concept of a mobile phone.

However, there are some really stupid Twitter apps. The one that truly took the biscuit today was My Tiny Jesus in which a small Jesus figure spouts random Twitter posts at you. Which really goes to reinforce the point that some people really do have too much time on their hands.

Here are three of the better Twitter apps that I have recently found on my travels :

• Get help with crosswords and scrabble with Wordbot.
• Add events to your Google Calendar using TwitterCal.
• Read the first lines of books twice a day with TwitterLit.

I am using my Twitter profile at the moment to mainly post interesting news stories that I come across while I am online. These links appear in the sidebar of my blog and I am looking at other ways to push the content. I will also be promoting blog posts with Twitter as well as Twitting on my mobile when I am out and about.

But don’t worry - when my ass itches, I won’t inform you on Twitter.

Related posts:

1. Tools, Apps and Bots to Improve your Twitter Experience
2. Updating Google Calendar with your mobile phone and Twitter GCal
3. The media’s growing obsession with Twitter
4. Store your SMS messages online with TreasureMyText
5. Skype set to heat up the mobile phone wars