Soon to be valentine’s day again, hip hip hooray.  I like the sentiment, I think that lavishing your loved ones with attention is a great idea.  It’s just sad that we need a special day of the year to encourage people to do it.

I was listening to a podcast this morning (You look nice today) where the guys on it were talking about their Christmas present buying methods.  Now this is a comedy podcast, so this may not necessarily be true….  However, one of the guys put forward that he and his wife buy each other nothing and Christmas, birthdays, Valentines etc.  Instead, at random times for no reason at all they would buy each other gifts.  This is a brilliant idea!  Everyone loves a surprise, and nice as it is to get gifts on dedicated days it’s all rather predictable, but you can’t fail to be touched when someone buys you something or does something for you out of the blue.

Mrs Tom and I haven’t ever dined out together for valentine’s.  Thankfully she appreciates that restaurants will server poor quality food (because they ram in as many people as they can and can’t possibly provide good service to them all, sadly even the nicer ones), and charge far more than they usually do.  I’m not going to harp on about this point, because most people know this and it’s been written about thousands of times.  However, there do seem to be a lot of people who don’t seem to understand this, and they are the people filling the restaurants.  Let’s call them….. “idiots.”

Mrs Tom and I are heading out tonight for dinner (if Mrs Tom remembered to book it – romantic aren’t I).  It is a special valentine’s menu, but it’s at one of our favourite restaurants – The Indian Princess in Margate.  Let’s not say too much about Margate.  Yes, that’s about enough.  The Indian Princess however is exquisite.  It is a gourmet Indian restaurant of a quality rarely found outside of London.  It is very well reviewed and I’ve enjoyed the food thoroughly every time I’ve been.  Even Adam Curry and John Dvorak would enjoy it, and that is saying something.  Perhaps they’d like to drop by one time and take me there and I’ll show them.  Just a thought.

I wish people would treat each other the way they do on valentine’s day, Christmas, Thanksgiving, birthdays and all those other special days every day of the year.  Then maybe we wouldn’t have to listen to Wizzard every Christmas singing about it being Christmas every day (although I do actually quite like the song).

Twitter is a social networking site with a very limited focus.  Its sole reason for being, say its authors, is to allow its users to answer the question “what are you doing?”  Think of it as your Facebook status.  That’s it.  Really.  It has been dismissed and mocked by those that do not quite understand it, only later for them to succumb to the temptation themselves.  More recently, ‘celebrities’ have been signing up in droves, joining the throng in what looks to be this year’s new toy.

In fact Twitter has been around for at least a couple of years, and was for the longest time a niche exploited by Silicon Valley tech folks like Leo Laporte (twit.tv, leoville.com, @leolaporte) and his friends.  Even John C Dvorak (dvorak.org/blog, @therealdvorak) was late to the party, rubbishing Twitter for the longest time before finally succumbing to its advances.  Now he’s a regular user and happy to be so.

So what is it about Twitter that makes it so popular?  Different strokes for different folks, it has to be.  People with a huge following like Dvorak or Laporte can use Twitter to their advantage, to crowd source or get a message to a huge number of people almost immediately.  The folks who are following them are hoping to find out something new, interesting or funny from someone they admire or have an interest in.

There is an element of voyeurism too.  Jonathon Ross and Robert Llewellyn are happy to share with you their day-to-day activities in a way which brings their followers closer to them, and allows them to directly interface with their fanbase.  It brings a feeling of being connected.  For the less famous of us, Twitter is about the following, and an opportunity to get a reply from a person that you would likely otherwise never have the opportunity to meet.

Stephen Fry is a phenomenon.  He does little more than provide an insight into his daily schedule and provide some of his clever wit, yet he has amassed a following which at the time of writing this is second only to the president of the USA in the twitter rankings.  Fry does little if nothing in the way of self promotion, so it would appear his following is nothing short of a reflection of the adoration his public has for him.

Twitter is replacing blogging in many places.  This no doubt has a lot to do with the ease at which one can contribute – updates can be made via the web and many many clients for both handheld devices like the iPhone as well as PCs and Macs.  There is also the 140 character limit, which has led to this form of communication to be referred to as micro-blogging.  Short sharp ‘tweets’ are much easier to throw out than thoughtful, considered blog postings.

There is something for everyone in Twitter.  Get signed up and follow some folks you like.