Do only twits tweet?

What am I doing right now? If you must know, I'm staring at the computer screen, toggling between this column and my e-mail program, my online bank balance and photos of my dog. Oh wait, that was a few seconds ago. Now I'm hungry. Now I'm realizing I have no bread for toast. Now an hour has passed since I started this paragraph.

Do you find this interesting? Me neither. But the Age of Oversharing is upon us, and those of us who lack enthusiasm for minutia are in a distinct minority. The current enabler-in-chief of this movement? Twitter, that suddenly ubiquitous "microblogging" system that lets users post updates of 140 characters or less that answer the question "what are you doing now"?

Most people still aren't quite sure what Twitter is -- with only 14 million users, it's no Facebook yet -- but it's insinuated itself into the popular lexicon so vigorously that just about everyone seems to have at least heard of it and its infinitive, "to tweet" (when you use Twitter, technically you are tweeting.)

This is due in large part to a rather sudden media embrace. Last month, both the Doonesbury comic strip and "The Daily Show" poked fun at Twitter and its users, which now include a number of members of Congress (Jon Stewart scolded them for tweeting during hearings). Last week, election protesters in the nation of Moldova were reportedly aided and galvanized by the play-by-play rally updates afforded by Twitter. And over the weekend, when Amazon.com experienced a "glitch" -- Amazon's word -- that caused tens of thousands of gay-related books to be de-ranked on the site, the Twitter outcry went viral so effectively that the company is now experiencing a major public relations crisis.

Meanwhile, many news outlets, ever desperate to attract even a passing glance from tech-obsessed, attention-impaired youngsters, are now tweeting about breaking news (as well as less-than-breaking, not-necessarily news) with the same vigor they bring to reporting. This week, CNN's Breaking News Twitter account (then the most popular account, according to the tracking site Twitterholic) was inching toward a record-making 1 million followers ("followers" are the people who actually read your posts). This was apparently so exciting and dramatic that Ashton Kutcher, whose account was ranked third, challenged CNN to see who could be the first to reach that 1 million mark. Guess who won.