“So what are you doing?”

That is often the question asked by our friends and family. Although it might seem annoying to some, when asked that all the time but when we know what our friends are doing we feel more connected.

The little things you do, like what you have for lunch, what book you currently reading or what shows you are watching might be interesting to someone you know.

These days we have blogs that one could use to update their friends and family, but real life happens in between blog posts. This is where a micro-blogging platform such as Twitter comes in handy. Twitter takes the mundane ‘what I’m having for lunch’ posting off away from blogs.

Twitter is a web based service that makes it possible for one to share byte size updates between friends and family, or strangers. With Twitter you could update your followers about the things in your life and you could also follow the people of interest to you via the web.

I am a late comer when to twitter. Although I might have signed up in the early days, but only recently that I’ve started to actually use Twitter.

At first glance, a Twitter page look like blogs, with short posts. Look again you will see that each page is personal, containing updates from friends and people you follow. You might see a different side of the people you thought you had known.

You follow your friend’s updates, your friend follow your updates. Twitter works because it is simple, a tweet is only 140 character long. With a limitation like that you are forced to make your update short and to the point.

Twitter as a micro-blogging platform actually has the potential to be something more. Twitter is what you and your network makes of it. You could use it to broadcast ideas or inquires to your followers.

If you have more then a thousand followers you might find it to be a useful tool. Like this guy who ‘tweets’ his way out of the Egyptian jail.

There are many ways to get your ‘tweets’ and to ‘tweet’ from. You can track and follow Twitter on the web or on your mobile phone. By making their API available, other are able to develop third party apps that interacted with Twitter. Twitterrific of Icon Factory is a great app to distract you from work with all the Twitter updates.

Right now I hardly got any followers, but I am using Twitter as a stalking tool to keep track of web people like Leo Laporte, Kevin Rose, Jason Calacanis and more. When a tech story broke, most of the time you will see it first on Twitter.

If you are not on Twitter, give it a try. I you already are on Twitter don’t forget to follow me on Twitter.