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The conversation is the relationship. If the conversation stops, all possibilities for the relationship become smaller and all possibilities for the individuals in the relationship become smaller, until one day we overhear ourselves in mid-sentence, making ourselves smaller in every encounter, behaving as if we are just the space around our shoes, engaged in yet another three-minute conversation so empty of meaning it crackles.

Seattle developer Damon Cortesi has written a great little perl script that will generate your Twitter Stats which you can be make into some cool graphs of using the Numbers app. Here are my current Twitter Stats. You will need to know how to access a terminal and navigate the OS X filesystem, but after that it just takes one command to run. Mine took a couple of minutes to finnish since it needed to parse 93 pages of Twitter data, which I then just cut-and-past into the Numbers template that Damon provided.

But fundamentally, this micro-announcement service does serve two needs: to post updates with low overhead and to follow a concise stream of updates.

If you care about productivity, don't check your Twitter feed while you're trying to get work done. Disruptions are deadly for productivity because it takes several minutes to reorient the brain every time you go off track looking at something else. Stick to checking updates once per day—for example, during lunch. All the tweets will still be there.