I love refining the art of finding and defining the very best tone for exploiting a new communication medium. Some things are made for email, others for IM; some things are made for blogs, others for tumblelogs, and others for Twitter.

What’s fascinating about Twitter is that it exists in the very, very fine margin between what’s interesting enough to be posted on your blog and what’s so inane it shouldn’t be published anywhere.

And you’ve got to take your audience into account: Who’s going to read your updates? (My point of view: people who know you. I don’t understand why you’d “follow” someone you don’t know — unless they’re so very spiritual — and I don’t take strangers into account when I post updates.) And how many of those can potentially have any interest in what you’re posting?

If you’re posting “going to the bakery now,” nobody cares. “Going to such bar or such party tonight” works if it’s an open invitation to join you there. I allow myself to post something like “going for groceries today because tomorrow is yet another goddamn holiday” because I consider there’s a though in here — not a very interesting one (that’s why it’s on Twitter and not my blog), but you’ve got to assume that whoever is “following” you has some interest in hearing your random thoughts. Finally, "@someonelse: you’re right" does not fucking work under any circumstance.

Here’s my rule of thumb regarding Twitter as a chat platform: Does your message make sense in isolation, and does it make sense to all (or at least several of) your readers? If you’re replying to another user’s message, and

I guess the bottomline is: Would you post an archive of a day’s or a week’s worth of your Twitter updates — and only yours — on your blog? If the answer is no, then you’re a Twitter spammer to me.