He forgot his bedside manners

I've been meaning to write about A.C. Newman for the last few days, but I think it's gonna have to wait. He's not that inspiring for me anyway. What I want to talk about today is social networking and etiquette.

Every article I read about this fancy new social network Twitter mentions the correct way one should "tweet." Should you pimp your business? Is it okay to actually post what you're doing when it asks "What are you doing?" My question is, what does it matter?

People can't seem to wait to set down a batch of rules whenever a new form of communication pops up. But isn't part of the fun of the interwebs making up rules as you go along? Sure it's annoying to get Twitter spam, but I really enjoy the diversity of posts from my fellow Twitterers. I get job listings from some, random musings from others and grocery lists from celebrities. If they were all forced to say interesting of informative things or only share links, Twitter would be a lot more boring.

So let's ignore all the advice and just do whatever we want with Twitter. Seriously, it's just 140 characters. How many rules can there possibly be for such a short message?