I'm not the only one lamenting the inexorable rise of twitter.

Suddenly everyone is twittering. Barak Obama tweets. Any politician worth his salt has a twitter page. Celebrities are at it (arent they always). Every man, woman, child, company, pet .... has a twitter page.

Twitter has fed into the unmet needs of the nosy neighbour in the digital era. Twitter pages have a certain air of keeping up with the Jones; not only in the content of the posts but also in the design of individual pages.

For me, twitter is just facebook without the interesting bits.  

Savvy advertising gurus have embarrassed this new advertising medium. Both directly and subtly Twitter is being used to advertise products, brands, individuals, politics and ideas. The internet is constantly opening up new methods of reaching consumers. What will come next?

And some of the best advertisers are the publicists of prominent celebrities.

Ashton Kutcher tried to beat CNN to be the first person with a million "followers" on twitter. He has now outstripped CNN and beaten them to 2 million "followers" as well! But does he actually say anything interesting? Anything important? Or actually - is anything that appears twitter page actually written by him? There was certainly a great deal of impressive advertising involved in this coup - it was on the front page of the times website for goodness sake!

Is twitter a good way to get your news updates? Bite sized chunks of news are delivered directly, in real time by all of the major newspapers, broadcasters and bloggers. But in 140 characters can you present a balanced argument? Most posts are simply links to other articles online and in that respect twitter can be a swift way of gathering information. Twitter could help you keep on the pulse.

But can our humble human brains survive the vast quantities of information which twitter can provide us with? Will this be the next stage of human evolution?

http://twitter.com

http://twitter.com/michmog

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article6409208.ece

http://twitter.com/APlusK