The New Yorker’s George Packer ruminates on Twitter:

Who doesn’t want to be taken out of the boredom or sameness or pain of the present at any given moment? That’s what drugs are for, and that’s why people become addicted to them. Carr himself was once a crack addict (he wrote about it in “The Night of the Gun”). Twitter is crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I’m morally superior to it, but because I don’t think I could handle it. I’m afraid I’d end up letting my son go hungry.

See the full piece for more. (HT Justin Taylor)

via Stop the World: Interesting Times : The New Yorker.

Last week was a big week for Twitter in the national news. Ashton Kutcher and CNN competed against one another to see who would reach 1 million followers first. Then Oprah plugged the micro-blogging service on her Friday show. All told, comScore’s global numbers for March 2009 show visitors to Twitter increased from 9.8 million to 19.1 million.

Given the growing popularity of Twitter, a lot of my clients have been jumping on board. Furthermore, they’ve been coming to me to design custom backgrounds and color palettes for their Twitter profiles. To service them and new clients better, I’ve setup ProfileExpert.com as a one-stop shop for getting your own custom Twitter background and color palette.

Although creating your own custom Twitter profile is a moderately simple process. I’ve found that my clients prefer to hire me for the job, knowing that I’ll be able to customize their profile quicker and with professional results. If you’re in the market for a customized Twitter profile, let me invite you to order yours today over at ProfileExpert.com.

Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson, Inc. shares his 12 Reasons to Start Twittering. Among my favorites are his third and fourth points:

3. It will help you stay connected to people you care about. This is one of the few technologies I’ve found that actually contributes to community-building. In today’s busy world, it’s difficult to keep up with others. Twitter makes it easy—and fun.

4. It will help you see a new side of your friends. In an odd sort of way, Twitter “humanizes” people and provides a context for better understanding them. If you follow me on Twitter, for example, you’ll quickly see that I get excited, bored, frustrated, and confused—sometimes all in the same day. You’ll also learn what is important to me and what drives me crazy.

Read his full post for more.

This week I passed one-thousand updates on my Twitter stream. In celebration of the occassion, I thought I would take another stab at explaining Twitter to the lay person.

Explaining what Twitter is is easy (i.e. it’s Facebook status updates without the rest of Facebook getting in the way); however, explaining why anyone would want to share their life in 140 character “tweets” is another story.

So, rather than philophosizing about why one would want to “Twitter,” I’m going to take a different angle in this post and introduce you to some of the great people I’ve met during my first year on Twitter. These are all people I suspect I wouldn’t have met otherwise; however, Twitter has been our natural bridge for starting relationships, many of which have spilled over into real-world connections. Continue Reading

Does this short capture your sentiments towards Twitter?

(By the way, you can follow me on Twitter.)

Although his posts are easily quotable in their entirety, I’m going to resist the urge and point you to Abraham Piper’s post which which deals with the question, “Is Twitter necessarily narcissistic?“

This New York Magazine piece captures the mystique of Twitter as a slowly emerging web phenomena.

Janis Krums was riding on one of the first ferries to arrive at the scene of Thursday’s plane crash in New York’s Hudson River. He snapped a photo with his iPhone and tweeted it on his Twitter stream. Here’s a direct link to the photo.

His photo was one of the first photos of the crash, and it illustrates the emergence and ubiquity of the real-time web. For more info, check out Robert Scoble’s round-up of real-time coverage of the crash.

Twitter Charts is a Yahoo! Pipes mashup which graphs any user’s tweets based on a timeline that includes the day of the week and the hour. (HT: The Inquisitr)

A new intelligence report by the Army’s 304th Military Intelligence Battalion speculates on the potential for Twitter to be a tool for terrorists. However, as VentureBeat’s MG Siegler points out, this report contains humorously flawed concepts and senarios which could be easily achieved through more private and previously existing technologies.