twitterlove353

She loved me not.

I fell in love on Twitter this year.

She was brunette, with flashing blue eyes I'd seen on the tele, so I tried what any modern-day stalker would do in these times of interconnectivity: I "followed" her on the world's most popular micro-blogging site.

I should have known it wasn't going anywhere when she didn't follow me back. Still, we traded inanities a few times when she'd tweet about her job, but I didn't feel she was showing me the real her, it seemed somehow confected.

Alas, a boorish comment from me here and there and she no longer answered my tweets at all: it was a short romance, less than 500 characters I'd gauge, but thoroughly modern.

I realised soon after she was probably not the girl, or the tweep, for me because she was a little staid. However, she was a fabulous microcosm of the Twitter phenomenon.

See, this lass sits at one pole of the Twitter experience where she uses the site to promote her employer, do a bit of networking, but rarely gets personal (i.e. tweets when drunk - which is when the real fun begins).

I reckon circumspection is not the reason Twitter has more than 200 million users worldwide: people don't want a press release or desk-top calendar axiom from the folks they follow; they want insight into another person's world.

Say what you will about the pointlessness of Twitter but it does give you insight into strangers' thoughts, their obsessions and, at best, their hearts.

Granted these insights are sometimes akin to listening to school kids talk with their mouths full on a crowded bus, but they are authentic, something that most mainstream media fails at miserably.

I can't tell you how many times I've read a breathless tweet from someone about a TV show or genre of music I would never dream of exploring, but for this person, it's the highlight of their day and they're making the internet's equivalent of guinea pig squeaks.

If nothing else, Twitter serves to remind us of the incredible breadth of interests among humans, and this is a wonderful thing if you're even remotely curious about how other people live their lives.

Another of my Twitter crushes seems to specialise in perpetual positivity. At first I thought it was just for show - she does work in PR - but then I realised there actually are people who are healthily optimistic, who cherish every moment of their lives.

This too is a wonderful thing to be reminded of on a regular basis, and I now quite enjoy her heraldic, bushy-tailed take on even the most mundane of experiences.

As an icebreaker with strangers, Twitter can also be a great way to meet people with similar interests (or perversions).

The Dark Lord of Australia's Twitter users - author John Birmingham - tells me he's made many left-of-field friendships with his followers; he's even met some of them and didn't end up bound in a cellar with a gag-ball in his mouth.

"Twitter is what I have instead of a crack pipe. I should really seek help but I'm such a hopeless attention junkie my brain starts hurting if I don't get some @ction every couple of minutes," he says. 

"You can forget to write whole books 'cos you're too busy following everyone's bitching about #LOLBolt or the fascinating f---ing sandwich they just ate.

"But it's the gold standard for whipping up a random posse of mad drinkers when on book tour. I put on 2kgs of alcohol flab last time. I blame twitter for that."

Seriously, what's not to love?

Sam de Brito's latest novel Hello Darkness is in bookstores now. You can follow him on Twitter here.