On Twitter - Brilliant!

In his comment to my last post asking opinions about Twitter, Jared shared this link with an excellent analysis of Twitter that rings pretty true with my feelings on it. Here's an excerpt of the beginning pretty elegantly sums up my feelings on the service:

Twitter scares me. For all its popularity, I see at least three issues: 1) it's a near-perfect example of the psychological principle of intermittent variable reward, the key addictive element of slot machines. 2) The strong "feeling of connectedness" Twitterers get can trick the brain into thinking its having a meaningful social interaction, while another (ancient) part of the brain "knows" something crucial to human survival is missing. 3) Twitter is yet another--potentially more dramatic--contribution to the problems of always-on multi-tasking... you can't be Twittering (or emailing or chatting, of course) and simultaneously be in deep thought and/or a flow state.

There's a lot more intelligent and insightful analysis of why Twitter can be simultaneously fascinating and really quite frightening. I'm pretty sure I will continue to avoid using it or even signing up for it, except I'll be using Dave's twitter while we're at GenCon so that we can torment those who aren't in attendence / aid those that are there in stalking us.