Well, after many frustrating months of waiting for Twitter to finally fix their gmail contacts import feature, I have finally done it!  Surprise, only two contacts were signed up — and that’s two more than I expected.  However, one of those is a professor who probably only checked them out because they’re using his technology and the other was a friend who had only one update:

“nothing.”

Social pressure from me caused him to add another update.  That’s what I tell myself anyway.

What is Twitter, you ask?  It’s basically Facebook status updates made global.  Indeed, you can even add a Facebook app that allows Twitter to update your status.  Of course, it means you get “is twittering: ” inserted at the beginning of any tweet (a single Twitter status update) as your status update.

While Twitter at first seems like status updates on steroids, it’s actually evolving into something else far more useful.  I’ve talked before about the information diaspora and the difficulty of keeping up with all your personal information as it flies around the web.  Twitter at first adds to that mess, but it does offer interesting ways of tracking small bits of information.

Erin McKean, the Dictionary Evangelist, uses it to keep track of new words she comes across.  Twitter lets you text updates from your cell phone or IM client so it’s easy to update on the go.  Robert Scoble uses it as a sort of mini-blog of things he comes across or finds out about that wouldn’t really make a full-fledged blog post.  So Twitter has uses for logging your web surfing, hobby, life activities, etc., which is a useful information diaspora reducing measure in my book.  The only question remains whether this would be of any use to you.

Check me out and follow my updates on Twitter.  If you haven’t signed up, consider it.  If you do, let me know so I can follow you.