Before Oprah started twittering, I signed up for an account. When I originally posted here about that, I wasn’t entirely sure what I thought about the service or why I had signed up. I just thought I’d try anything that would encourage me to write, because I frequently don’t do that enough. I thought the character limit would be a good creative challenge (it has), and I thought it would be a fun way to find out what other people think and know (it has been this as well).

So now that it has become more main stream, and I actually have to answer the question “Why do you twitter?” for real, I thought I’d write about why I continue to use this.

I love hearing what other people have to say.

This pretty much sums up why I keep logging into twitter and checking what the people I follow have written. I love to hear what people say and how they communicate their thoughts.

I do this in conversations that I actually have to use my ears to hear too. I am notorious amongst my friends for writing down perfect snipits of conversations that surround me. I’ve done this in restaurants, at coffee shops, in line at Disneyland, listening to my old neighbors through the thin walls. Twitter is the same thing for me.

Twitter provides a record of the conversations I always assumed were happening online and in the rest of the world where I wasn’t. Yes, some of what shows up is inane, but even the inanity represents real people and how they talk. What better service for a storyteller to keep track of how real people talk than a written record?

And as long as I can still access the funny/silly/pointless/upset/inane representations of how people communicate with one another, I will keep logging into Twitter.