Twitter first crossed my radar screen when Michael Patrick Leahy appeared on Steve Foley’s Aftermath Radioto talk about Top Conservatives on Twitter. I didn’t know hardly anything about twitter at the time, so signed up. At first, it seemed that “Fritter” should have been the real name for the site- it used up a lot of time, with little to show up front.

Truthfully, I didn’t really understand the platform for months, and my usage dropped. Then one day Caleb Howe asked me why I wasn’t on Twitter, and said I should really look into it. Now this cut to the quick! I realized I wasn’t a Twitter god, but I had been on it for some time, and was following him and vice versa. But he didn’t notice! So, having been shamed into it, I decided to get my Twitter act together.

Once you know all the ropes (and TweetDeck is an invaluable way to display tweets, which is the best way to learn those ropes), it is a formidable networking tool. Consider the math: if each twit (:>) has 100 unique followers, and they send a story to them, and they also have a 100 uniques, and so on: well, just three rounds of tweeting and you’ve reached a million people. (Some twitterers are overly impressed with their follow base- it is their followers’ bases that really matter.

Two recent incidents have really demonstrated the power of Twitter. The first was the outrage expressed on Twitter at the vile “hate F****” article by Guy Cimballo on rape fantasies re conservative women, which motivated Playboy to pull the piece, and the related firestorm concerning the firing of Tommy Christopher by AOL.

The second is the current news cycle regarding the Iranian election and the mullah’s attempted coup d’etat. The Twitter community pushed the story, reached out to the Iranian supporters, retweeted their reports like mad and put the conventional media to shame. It was astonishing, and gratifying.

So why, given all this potential for good stuff, #damnyou @CalebHowe? Because this summer I swore I would get my act together regarding house projects and come to think of it, a life. But now, as I’m obsessively wasting away in Twitterville, that looks highly unlikely!

Oh, yeah, almost forgot: I can be found at www.twitter.com/streetwise_IT Please tweet me. Especially when it’s time to vacuum.