Of course, you don’t need to check the badge to follow the ‘Tweets” from me or Tracy. Just subscribe to our individual Twitter accounts and have our alerts sent to you via your cell phone or instant message or (ugh) email.

Twitter seems to have its benefits, and its negatives. I could never remember to enter in information…

Then parents could know where their children are at night, door-to-door salesmen and telemarketers would know when we’re home, criminals could rob our homes while we are safely away, and Homeland Security could track our movements.

Pay for it all through ad revenue. Reduce our taxes, build the cost into everything we buy that has an ad budget.

Instead of “Twitter,” just call it “Big Brother” or Big Sister.”

We were joking this morning that if we can’t develop an interesting way to develop and integrate this technology into real life, it’ll continue to look like Griff and I are self-absorbed little geeks who thinks the world really wants to know exactly what we’re doing at any given moment.

Isn’t the eventual goal of free services like that to morph into something like Facebook, where they can track your interests and generate data for targetted ads? (Is that, whether we know it or not, what happens even with free blogs that don’t show ads? Ad companies could track ad-free blogs fairly easily, couldn’t they? No one is preventing their access….)

He said he “was still not sure about the value of it… people are using it instead of IM and it is irritating.”

I told him that I turn off the alerts for those folks so I don’t get cell phone alerts. I’m currently interested in using Twitter just for geographic/civic purposes here in Northfield. I see its potential as a real-time community blogging tool, only via text messaging and IM.

I’d be very interested in following other Northfielders.