It’s time for me to jump on the bandwagon and weigh in on everyone’s absolute favorite/most despised (choose one) Web app: Twitter.

When Jeremy first told me about Twitter last year (“You can send text messages from your mobile and they show up on a website and all your friends can see them”), my response was, quite reasonably: why on earth would you want to do that? I couldn’t see any logical, practical value to it at all.

It was my friend Veerle who convinced me to sign up to Twitter last November. Jeremy was away at a conference and I was feeling lonely and trapped (this was the start of the whole passport thing), but when I signed up to Twitter, it was like a window opened up onto my friends around the world. And yes, it was a window onto what people were having for lunch, what they were watching on television and when they were going to bed—not earth-shattering stuff by any stretch. But somehow the very fact that it wasn’t earth-shattering stuff was a comfort, and being able to follow my friends and acquaintances as they went about their daily lives—and have them follow me as I went about mine—made me feel a tiny bit less isolated.

As more people signed up to Twitter, the site became even more fun, and despite the fact that it can be buggy and frustrating to use sometimes, I can now say unequivocally: I heart Twitter.

Now, many many blog posts have been written by many many people who have gone into much greater depth about the Twitter phenomenon than I intend to here. I am in no way qualified to expound upon the nature of social networks, machine-mediated human interaction, “Web 2.0”, hypes and trends, human social behavior, and so on and so forth. I also can’t really refute the observation that Twitter is a frivolous time-sink which merely reflects the mundanity of most people’s everyday lives (it is, and it does). And I’m not going to devise a detailed defense of Twitter just to counter all those who say “Twitter’s stupid, and people who use Twitter are stupid!” Each to his or her own. But I do want to describe what Twitter means to me, as a geeky non-geek, because as it turns out, it means quite a lot.

It particularly meant a lot to me during South by Southwest. I thought I was going to have to boycott Twitter altogether during SxSW because it would depress me to see all the fun I was missing out on. In fact, the exact opposite was true: being able to follow the comings and goings of Jeremy and my friends in Austin made me feel much, much closer to everyone there. It was the difference between me sitting around by myself and imagining that I was missing out on the most amazing event ever in the history of the world—and me sitting around by myself, but knowing that people were, say, eating barbecue or pondering what session to go to. Again, not earth-shattering stuff—and that’s the point. It’s the little things that make you feel more connected.

Twitter isn’t really a tool for meeting people, holding a conversation, working out problems, or making plans—though it can serve all of those purposes at various times (I Twittered back and forth with Relly before I ever got to meet her in person—and actually, we made plans to visit the knitted garden together through Twitter as well). Jeremy says he uses Twitter “to broadcast, not to converse”, and I think that makes a lot of sense. Now, you might justifiable criticize the concept of a bunch of people simply “broadcasting” at each other without attempting to engage in any deeper interaction, but if you think of it as a step up from your iChat status, then it’s not so odd.

And the fact is that reactions and interactions do take place, in a very loose and organic way, on Twitter: comments spawn other comments, threads come together and unravel again, a butterfly makes a latte in San Francisco and it triggers a wave of latte-making on the other side of the Twittersphere. You really have to go with the flow, though. If you come to Twitter expecting to engage in a non-stop back-and-forth between you and your “friends”, you’re probably going to be disappointed. I think it’s more useful to look at Twitter as a pool of chatter that you can dip into occasionally and then leave again. It’s kind of like of eavesdropping. It’s kind of like the office water cooler (Thomas Vander Wal’s great analogy). It’s mostly just a pleasant background hum that adds an extra layer of richness to my day.

One of the many issues surrounding Twitter is whether it has any real social value. Kathy Sierra has posted a long and erudite analysis of Twitter in which she ponders whether Twitter actually does more harm than good because it seduces you into thinking you’re having meaningful social interaction, when in fact you’re depriving yourself of the “true” or “real-life” interaction you need to survive. Putting that aside for the moment, what struck me most about her post was where she writes: “I am not in the target audience for Twitter—I am by nature a loner. I don’t want to be that connected.”

I find this remarkable, because I’m a loner (as I never tire of pointing out). I am inherently introverted, I am inherently shy, I am inherently a homebody, and I work from home by myself doing a job which is inherently solitary. For someone like me, the Web is a lifeline to the wider world, and tools like Twitter offer precisely the type of connection that I’m comfortable with on daily basis: namely, an “ambient intimacy” that doesn’t overtax me socially, but that offers just enough personal, human feedback to remind me that I’m not alone.

I suppose the counterargument would be that, really, I am still alone—I’m still sitting by myself in front of a computer. But the key is that I don’t feel alone. And if that’s just a case of me being seduced by a false sense of social interaction, then I offer myself up to the seduction whole-heartedly. But I don’t really think it is a false sense of social interaction. I think it’s just a new level of social interaction, one which fits somewhere in amongst all the other levels: from face-to-face communication, to phone calls, to letters or emails, to instant messaging, to text messages…

Of course Twitter is no substitute for actually being with people. Twitter (and Flickr) were a godsend during SxSW because they made me feel connected to everyone there, but I still would have given my right arm to have actually been there in person. But that doesn’t mean Twitter should be dismissed out of hand as being pointless. For me, it’s no more pointless than blogging, or posting pictures of my food on Flickr—things which I’m sure the vast majority of people in the world do find pointless, but which give me (and others, apparently) pleasure nonetheless.

I’d go so far as to say that “Twittering” isn’t even any more pointless than waving to someone you recognize on the street without stopping to talk to them. Sometimes all the social interaction you want or need is a little nod—or “tweet”—in your direction.