Mainly Twitter, but also a small koala.

Ooh, that was the most interesting poll yet, from my perspective. Nay kept inching ahead, but in the end Yay stole it with 19 votes to 17. Almost all of my real-life friends said Nay to Twitter, but then that's what you get when you are the biggest geek in your friendship group. I think they're wrong, actually, and I'll explain why.

It's taken me a few days to get my head round Twitter. At first I approached it as a series of Facebook status updates - little silly thoughts about my day or whatever. And I looked round, and a lot of other users are going with that interpretation - and some of them are funny and interesting enough to make it work, and most of them aren't. But since Twitter doesn't really work on a system of having 'friends', it all started to look a bit pointless. Especially since I'm already on Facebook and can keep in touch with people perfectly well using that.

But then I looked at this, which slightly changed my perspective. The benefit of Twitter is that it isn't just about finding out what your friends are up to - it's actually a way of finding all kinds of news as soon as it breaks, and communicating directly with people who aren't necessarily your friends but who have something interesting to say. You don't have to plough through their interests and their photos and their friends - all you see is what they say, and it's easy to start or stop following them. It also somehow seems more acceptable to stop following someone on Twitter than to defriend them on Facebook - there might be someone on there that you love to hear from, but if their tweets are primarily about their work, it's perfectly reasonable for you to stop following them. And you can still dip in and out to see what they're up to - most people's profiles aren't private.

As a blogger I think Twitter is also a useful way of communicating with more people, and I know a lot of lovely Twitterers have visited this blog over the last week, which is great. The concept feels to me like the perfect combination of sophisticated and simple: it's sophisticated in the way it connects you directly to a huge number of people, and simple in the sense that it cuts out all the extra noise of other networking sites, so that you can focus in on the conversations that interest you. Somehow it feels both more and less personal than Facebook.

There are also auxiliary sites that help you get more out of Twitter, depending on what you want. I like Twitscoop, which tells you which words are being used the most in Tweets at the current time. This is how I found out about the recording of Christian Bale shouting, before it hit the news. And if there's one thing I love, it's being first with the gossip.

So there you go: I'm sticking with it for now. I don't think my updates have been great so far, but I'm still getting the hang of it, and I hope to get better at it. You should keep an eye on me. And if you're on there, please leave a comment and your Twitter name on this blog so I can check you out.

And now, for the animal fans, here is a picture of a koala. There's a heatwave in Adelaide, and it went into someone's garage to cool down, and took a bath in a bucket of water. I don't know why I'm finishing on this note, except that I thought the Twitter chat might be a bit dry. I'm rambling now. I'll stop.