I've added a new gadget that I want to make you aware of.  Now, before you go thinking that I must be some kind of goofy gadget guy who loves all these bells and whistles that are coming out today, allow me to assuage your concerns - I can hardly keep up with them, and I find most of them to be annoying little nuisances that are destroying the simplicity of the Internet, if there's still such a thing these days.  I'm from the Pac-Man generation, meaning I'm more comfortable with a little yellow guy negotiating a maze under joystick control, instead of the complexities of WOW, which stands for "Wickedly Over-Whelming".

But coffeesister is a pretty good gadget judge, and once in a while she adds one that I find intriguing, so I have her add it to mine (I try not to mess with the html, lest I make a mess of it).  The latest addition is a TWITTER widget, which you'll see over to the left, just over my ABOUT RHODESTER box..

The widget is not TWITTER itself.. it's just a widget that someone made to allow my twitter stream to be shown on my blog sidebar.  My twitter stream has nothing to do with any biological functions, it simply refers to the "tweets" I put on my TWITTER.  Tweets are little mini-blogs of one or two lines - kind of a status update, like MySpace and FaceBook have been doing for a while.  Only it turns out that TWITTER is an ingenious design, in that TWEETING is ALL it does, and you don't have to go to the TWITTER site to tweet.  You can tweet from your chat program, a widget on your desktop or your mobile device, be it a phone or some kind of wireless thingy.

Yes, they call it "tweeting".  Tweeting on TWITTER.  It all makes perfect sense after a few beers.

I've just started tweeting, and here's what's got me so excited that I'm going through underwear about five times faster than usual.. GOOGLE CHAT is the only live chat program I use, and I keep a module open when I'm online, in case anyone who knows me wants to say HI.  When you join TWITTER and start tweeting, they allow you to add TWITTER as a friend in Google chat.  It's solely for the purpose of tweeting, which means you don't have to actually chat with a live person.  It's only the TWITTER computer on the other end, and if you send it a line like..

 "doing laundry and waiting for the mail"

..it immediately puts it into your twitter stream.  In my case, it shows up in my blog widget right away, just because I know how concerned you all are with what RhodesTer is up to moment by moment, and making sure that his underwear is clean, especially after having discovered a gadget like TWITTER.

You can also follow the tweets of your friends using the chat module if you'd like.  It sounds excruciatingly dull, but it's really quite addictive and interesting, just like The Southern Conservative.

It's still an ongoing, raging debate as to whether or not the human race is descended from monkeys, and whereas the jury is still out on that, I think it's perfectly obvious that the people who designed TWITTER, which allows you to TWEET, are descended from birds.  These birds have thought of everything too.. not only can you tweet from your chat module, mobile device or desktop, I'm sure that someday soon you'll be able to do so from your microwave, fridge and television set.  Possibly, you'll just think a tweet, and it'll show up in your twitter stream.. how awesome would that be?

Also, you don't have to follow the twitter streams of everyone in the world, which would be a tad overwhelming.  There's a "PUBLIC TIMELINE" page on the TWITTER website that shows the twitter streams of the most recent people who've tweeted, and none of them are more than 5 or 10 seconds old whenever you look at it.  This means that people all over the world are tweeting all of the time, in different languages, while sitting in chairs, walking along sidewalks, driving their cars or flying through the air.  I didn't say they did it safely.

When you join TWITTER, you can opt to just follow the tweets of certain people, and you can choose to let anyone follow yours, or just your friends.  I have about 9 people I'm following the tweets of, and they all show up in a widget on my desktop, whereas I'm the only one who shows up in my BLOG WIDGET, because I don't want to inundate you with too much information.. that would just be wrong.  So, my tweets are the only ones that show up on my sidebar, because it's my blog.

A part of the fun is that I can put a little blurb on there that I don't necessarily want to blog about, and I can do it easily from my chat or mobile phone.  Don't you WANT to know when I'm in the shower?  Now you can!

If I know you, and you join up because of me, then let me know and I'll follow your tweets.  You can follow mine too, without loading this blog.  You can opt to have them sent to your mobile device, desktop widget and/or chat module - or not.  YOU'RE the one in control, and you have a zillion options, which is the nice thing about using TWITTER to TWEET.

On a final note, coffeesister invites you to follow HER tweets too, and she'll likely follow yours.  As for the nuts and bolts about adding TWITTER WIDGETS and all of that stuff, please ask HER.. I haven't a clue.

Call me Pac-Man.