'World Hello ... I'm a 22-year-old college student living in Iran. I'm going to post as much as I can until the police find my satellite connect."
The student identified himself as Abdul-Azim Mohammed. He called his new Twitter account TehranElection and began posting before dawn on Sunday morning in Iran. People had started gathering in the streets, he wrote, to protest an election they believed had been stolen. His uncle claimed to have seen authorities burning ballots. Television was airing a cooking show.
"I have a satellite dish that I normally keep in my basement cause they are illegal," he posted in a series of tweets a few minutes later, "and only use it when the government cuts off the internet ... I'm waiting for my other friends to report what is going on across the country, and will relay info to Twitter."
Half a world away, an uncounted number of English speakers waited with him.
Twitter, the global short-messaging service turned nanoblog turned social network, is the most bashed technology platform to come along. In its three-year existence, it has irritated sophisticates with its bothersome chatter and moved sociologists to label it a symptom of narcissistic youth. Musician John Mayer declared it "just one step away from posting pictures of your poop" after Jennifer Aniston reportedly dumped him for compulsive Twittering. "The Daily Show" presented Samantha Bee unable to tear herself away from Twitter to focus on an interview with Jon Stewart.
At dinner parties, the very mention of Twitter, or even its more lumbering cousin, Facebook, is likely to provoke someone at the table to mime the gagging reflex. "Twitter hate," wrote tech blogger Robert Scoble, he of 94,000-plus followers, "is the new black."
To be fair, Twitter is mostly silly. In my own unsteady Twitter life, I have followed (and sometimes, nervously, dropped) friends who tweeted the detailed results of their cake-and-cobbler baking, people whose relentless self-congratulations tweeted at a loneliness so deep it was painful to witness, fellow writers who perfunctorily summarized their lives in 140-character bursts, as if someone had threatened to fine them if they refused. The tweets of more advanced Twitterers are barely decipherable, so riddled are they with "re-tweets" (abbreviated as "RT," a forwarding of someone else's tweet), @ signs and "hashtags" (the # sign, used to mark a keyword).
