It feels like the first time.

I’m surfing @cdirksen’s Phish thread and have to pull myself away to blog about Twitter. I could rummage though Twitter’s closet for hours. It’s like discovering the internet all over again.

Tweets, micro bursts of thought, are cognitive headlines limited to 140 characters or less. It demands brevity. Hemingway would have been a masterful tweeter. I thought Twitter was just a bunch of 14-year olds telling each other what they had for breakfast. But the sophistication and creativity of the material is astounding.

It’s ten o’clock on Thursday night and I’m searching topics that interest me, #phish, #jonstewart, and #theonion. These commercial outfits generally use the microblog as a marketing tool to draw people to their main site. But as a user, the more attractive part was getting real-time information from fellow fans tweeting. I’m hunting around for fifteen minutes, stumble onto a Phish feed, and someone mentions that Trey Anastasio, the guitarist for Phish, was just referenced on The Office. I turn on the TV and dial up my dvr of The Office episode that just aired.

It was easy to quickly connect with people who share my same interests, even for a first-time user. And I swear the cold beer I sip tastes better, knowing I just used this technology to enhance my life.