I’ve been aware of the frenetic activity around Twitter for at least a year now, but I refuse to use it, both because it’s hard for me to see the value of 140 character text messages and because centralized Internet services leave a bad taste in my mouth. Such is the extent of my aversion that I limped along with my own PostFix/Courier-IMAP mail system with shitty webmail clients like SquirrelMail for years before my time in Iraq convinced me there’s simply no open-source email system remotely competitive with Gmail. When I switched my domain over to Google Apps for Domains, it was with a strong sense of shame, as though I’d been beaten in some epic contest.

The difference, of course, is that I desperately need stable, performant, spam-free, accessible email. I do not desperately need Twitter.

However, I am interested in the concept, and I’m not arrogant enough to believe all those millions of Twitter fans are all wrong.