"What are you doing?"

The Traveling Roths are now on Twitter. You can find us at http://twitter.com/TravelingRoths.

For those of you who are not in the know, "Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) via SMS, instant messaging, the Twitter website, or an application such as Twitterrific."

"Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and also instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone is the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, or through an application. While the Twitter service is free, posting and receiving updates via SMS may incur charges from the wireless carrier." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter)

What is it?
Twitter is a community of friends and strangers from around the world sending updates about moments in their lives. Friends near or far can use Twitter to remain somewhat close while far away. Curious people can make friends. Bloggers can use it as a mini-blogging tool. Possibilities are endless! (http://help.twitter.com/index.php?pg=kb.page&id=26)

In my own words, Twitter is a way of keeping friends and family in the loop with short, simple updates. Updates for times when a blog entry is "too formal", as funny as that sounds. Updates that your day-to-day interactions with these people would provide, were you geographically close.

At first I thought the concept was pretty cool, but not very useful to us, since a lot of what we do is pretty routine. I imagined our posts would look like, "Going to work", "Working," "Eating lunch", "Heading home." Who would want to read that?

But since I've signed up and began posting regularly, I've found it more interesting than I'd thought. We're now in the process of getting more friends and family to join up, because having a circle of people you'd like to stay in touch with, even very informally, is a pretty cool thing.

So go sign up. It's free and it's fun. You can update your own self via the web, instant messenger, or via text message from your phone, and have your friends' updates sent to those same places. . . or not.

In the meantime, check out our Twitter widget in the right margin of this blog ---->

Twitter: What are you doing?

p.s. For fun, see what other Twitter users from all over the world are doing right now!

Twittervision