Ramble: I still don't get this social media thing

I still can't figure out how to tweet.

I don't mean that I can't figure out how to type into the little box, edit my babbling down to 140 characters, and hit Update. That's not a problem.

I mean that I don't know what to tweet about. I don't understand Twitter.

I am following people on Twitter. One hundred and two people, to be specific. Other people's tweets make perfect sense to me. But I can't seem to learn from them, to figure out how to tweet myself. It's as if I can read but can't write - can't even get my head around the fact that it's the same alphabet for both operations.

What always stops me is, who would want to know what I'm about to say? How can I confidently tell an audience of potentially millions of people what I just posted on my blog, or... well, anything? That's not to say that I have millions of followers - I have a couple of dozen. But everybody can search the sea of tweets, so at any time anyone could fish out what I've said.

And that - the searching - is interesting. When I look at all of the different methods of online communication, the thing that strikes me as different about Twitter is the fact that you can search everybody's recent outputs, all at once. It's flat. It's unedited. Enter a search string and get every tweet with that string, back to the point where the exhausted frantically-working Twitter engine gives out and can't give you any more.

I have some vague notion that that fact points to the secret of Twitter, the answer to "what's the point?" But I still don't get the point.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.