Writing and Sizing Twitter

Twitter LogoFor some time now, everyone’s been crazy for Twitter, a kind of hub for digitally checking-in with your friends, where everyone alerts one another of what they’re up to, sometimes as frequently as from moment to moment. If that’s a bit of an obscure description, it’s because there’s nothing else quite like it. Actually, ‘cute’ may be the best and most succinct descriptor I can come up with.

More Web service than Web site, I had a hard time remembering to post the short, punchy updates that are Twitter’s principal currency until the advent of Icon Factory’s free, desktop-based Twitterific utility for Mac OS X.

Twitterific puts a persistent kind of ‘heads up display’ right on your Mac OS X screen so that your friends’ posts are immediately available, and that you can easily add new posts yourself. No more having to load the Web site, or remembering to visit that tab in your browser where you’ve got Twitter.com running.

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Bowled Over by Cuteness

Puppy Bowl IIII don’t watch much football, and by “much,” I mean any. Come Super Bowl time, I look for alternative programming on the television set. This year, for the third year in a row, I find myself tuned into Animal Planet’s suffocatingly adorable “Puppy Bowl.”

Some programming genius got a big promotion for this brainstorm, I’m sure: Puppy Bowl is three hours of aimless and irresistible lingering over puppies wrestling, jumping over each other, chewing toys, and just being plain ol’ cute inside a miniature football stadium. It’s also disturbingly pornographic — not libido-wise, you sicko, but rather in its plotless, sensationalistic ability to titillate your innate powerlessness before pure, unadulterated adorability. “Puppy Bowl III” runs back-to-back, apparently, throughout the evening, so you can tune in at any point and discover for yourself just how much of a softie you are.

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