Or Twitter-er. Or whatever.

It seems that Twitter is one of those particularly potent cultural signifiers, like veal, or David Foster Wallace novels, or Hummers. You don’t just like or dislike those things: you are for them or against them. While some people are content to say they simply don’t get Twitter’s appeal, or that it isn’t the kind of thing they like, many people feel the need to go farther and imply that Twitter is wrong and people who like it are in some way also wrong in an objective way.

John Blyberg recently wrote of Twitter that it is “the Paris Hilton of the social web. Slutty and unfortunate. The basest manifestation of the culture and systems it represents.”

Which sort of implies that if you think Twitter is kind of fun and harmless, you are guilty of perpetuating the debasement of the social web. Jeez, this thing is worse than MySpace?

Blyberg also says “I’ve received no less than 14 Twitter invitations from people whom I respect deeply and I have to wonder, why the **** are they using this?” (After reading that, I, of course, immediately sent him an invitation.)

I should hasten to say that Blyberg (or someone with the handle “jblyberg” anyway; identity is so fugitive on the web, isn’t it?) actually does have a Twitter account, and logged in today for long enough to tweet “I’m so slutty.” Which I love, because it shows that he isn’t taking this all that seriously. He also calls Twitter “candy 2.0″ which I’d say is on the money. But, then, I like candy.

Blyberg also links to Kathy Sierra’s post Is Twitter TOO good? which includes a graph of the asymtopic Twitter curve (reproduced here) which claims that “Twitter is the best/worst cause of continuous partial attention.”

Well, first, let’s look at that curve: if you think Sierra is on to something, you just might to have to write off all of the web including IM, blogs, RSS, and MySpace–hey, Twitter is worse than MySpace!–all of which are beyond Sierra’s “Brain Thrashing Threshold.”

That also assumes that the average Twitter user is a drooling idiot, continually waiting for another hit from the Twitter pipe, neglecting work and family while typing up his every fleeting thought, action, or impulse, and tweeting it out to other similarly pathetic wretches. To which I say, do you have cameras in my home?

Seriously, I think that this assumes too much about how people use Twitter (and IM and RSS and all those other attention-sinks). Yes, I have lost evenings to refreshing my feed reader, but most days I’m capable of bringing up a Twitter window when I’m on autopilot or just returning from lunch or something, and closing it (along with the feed reader, IM, and email) when I need to concentrate. If people are lacking these skills now, it’s time to learn them.

There is another Kathy Sierra graph that might also apply to Twitter, this from a post called Don’t give in to feature demands, and again reproduced here for your convenience. In short, if people tend to love or hate your product, you are probably on to something interesting.

Also some of the common criticisms of Twitter (“It’s banal! Who cares what you had for breakfast?”) can be solved by befriending more interesting Twitterati (thanks to Andrea Mercado for the vocab word). If your friends are boring you, get better friends. And for heaven’s sake ignore the public timeline. Judging Twitter based on what random strangers are posting is like judging Blogger by the random crap you get when you hit the “next blog” button.

The connection between “Twitter” and “twit” is obvious, but you also can’t spell Twitter without “wit,” and I wonder if certain people will come to be valued as Twitter friends due to how funny and interesting they can be in 140 characters or less. I’m sure I’m not the first one to think of tweeting in haiku:

Speaking of brevity, I think I’ll stop before this post gets any longer. mathowie probably covered this better in 140 characters or less, but that’s life. (mathowie ftw on the Twitter background images, too.)

In all this, please remember that I have only used Twitter via the web and IM, not via cell phone. Because Twittering this via text message would be crazy! I mean, can you imagine all the interruptions? I’d never get anything done. Twittering via text messages is dangerous, wrong, and scary, and people who do it are mouth-breathing, baby-eating kitten-stompers with the attention span of seventh-graders on crack. You know who probably uses Twitter via cell phone? That’s right: Paris Hilton.