Anyone else following celebrity or informational twitters? I just signed up for Barack Obama's. Too bad I didn't do it earlier so I could follow his world travels.

You should be able to at least go back and read about it now. Not as much fun as following it in "real time" but could still be an interesting read.

Wow, I have just as much desire to follow celebrity twitters as I have to read about their personal lives in supermarket newstand rags .... i.e., none.


Are their twitters juicier than ours? Do they post about themselves the same things the press does? Ya know, adultery, wife beatings, breakups, nude bathing???

Twitters are just like blogs - there are some on all fronts.

Yeah, we're starting to do Twitter feeds for some of our movies now. (That was why I got on Twitter originally.)

I follow Pop Candy blogger Whitney Matheson, for her real-time convention/etc updates. I also follow LAUpdates for info on what's happening around town.

Since Twitter is only of use to me by text message (it is blocked at work) I need to keep the volume down or I'll start missing actual important text messages and phone calls.

All I ask of any data stream is that the contents are of interest to me. When limited to 140 characters, the realm of potentially interesting stuff is drastically reduced. Almost to the point that the only reason it is interesting is because of who is saying it, not because of what is said. There are exceptions (a prominent film critic twittering first reactions while exiting each screening would be interesting to me independent of the exact person involved) but a Barack Obama press aide twittering as Obama isn't one of them. Nor is a fictional character.

A quick defense - The twitters say where Obama is, what he's up to. Not "Gotta pick up drycleaning" or "Stupid line at Starbucks", but "gave speech" etc. It doesn't have to be the man himself twittering. I think of it as news feed.

I am on. Sigchicken is my name in the twitter world.

Oh, I know what it is. That just isn't a stream of content that is any interest to me. Obama really twittering what his day is like might be. I don't care that he just landed in Pierre, North Dakota.