I have quite a bit of spare time, in between fixing various pieces of lab equipment trashed by students, so I’ve played with Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon and a variety of other social networking and bookmarking facilities.

I quickly tired of being poked, deluged with peculiar videos and having sheep thrown at me on Facebook so I now only use it to stay in touch with a few geographically distant friends. I still look at digg when I’m bored, mainly seeking weird and unusual news. The kind of stories that make me feel so ultra-normal or fortunate.

Twitter seems to be a little different. People enter short answers to the question ‘What are you doing?’ In my case the most common answer to that question would be ‘naff all’. Once signed up you can elect to ‘follow’ existing tweeters (twitterers? twits?). This means that you monitor their constant answers to this simple queston. I’m currently following a whole bunch of techie internet geeks whose work and blogs I’ve read at some time. Its interesting to see how similar and mundane people’s daily routines and activities really are.

But watch out for the Twitter Gestapo. They’ll blacklist and ban you very quickly if they even get a hint of spam. I foolishly followed the advice of someone who said that the thing to do is sign-up and follow as many people as possible, which I did. I sent a couple of updates regarding websites that I was looking at and immediately met with a slap and label as a spammer! Apparently it has something to do with the ratio of people following me to the people I am following. It’s not my fault that all my old chums are now dead or incapable of using a computer!

So I deleted that account and set up this new, spam free one. So why not give twitter a go yourself and make certain you follow me (doctorbone). You will get to hear about all sorts of interesting stuff like what I had for breakfast, what I’m wearing and maybe even what the weather is like. How can you resist?