Stephen Fry is feeling virtuous, having been on a five-mile walk around Manhattan. Will Carling is recovering from cleaning up his cat's vomit. Oli Barrett is racing along Kensington High Street towards a wedding in leafy Berkshire. “Missrogue” is listening to Aretha and feeling righteous. “Foodiesarah” is getting used to her new gravelly voice. And as for me ...well, I'm on Twitter, of course.

I'm here because Barack Obama used the so-called microblogging site to keep in touch with his supporters throughout the election campaign (sample message: “Just finished a major policy address in Toledo”); because others used it to keep abreast of developments during the Mumbai attacks (sample message: “Mumbai blasts: Taj Hotel is at back from my house! Hostages still inside; smoke pouring from windows; pics later”); and because registrations have grown by 600 per cent in 12 months.

But the main reason is that I believe one should keep abreast of important technological phenomena, just for the sake of it. Otherwise you risk waking up one day to find that you're the 2013 equivalent of George W. Bush, unable to distinguish a telephone from a PC, barking at desk lamps for failing to toast your muffins properly and refusing to use e-mail because you think carrier pigeons are better.

It was for this reason that I blogged, even though doing so essentially involved working for no pay, and why I joined 120 million others on Facebook, the social networking site, even though my handful of existing friends were exhausting enough. But I must admit that logging on to Twitter, through which users update each other on what they're up to and thinking through “micro-updates” called “tweets” of up to 150 characters, felt like more of a chore than usual. From what I'd read, it sounded like a souped-up version of Facebook's “status update” function. And as much as Facebook is a great way of sharing photos, avoiding work and staying in touch with people without actually having to talk to them, the problem with Facebook's “status update” function is that it is impossible to use without sounding like an twit.

Whenever I start filling in what I'm up to, a voice in my head tells me to stop, because it sounds too banal (Sathnam...is waiting in a queue), too needy (...has painful toothache), too boring (...is writing a column while experiencing painful toothache) or too repetitive (...is still writing a column while experiencing painful toothache). And I know that I'm not alone in feeling this way. Most of my Facebook “friends”, who now somehow exceed the combined number of people I have spoken to during my entire existence, simply don't use the function, or attempt to conceal their anxiety about it by posting self-conscious messages such as “Jemima is...Isambard Brunel”, filling the gap with song lyrics (“Jemima's never gonna dance again”) or book quotes (the latest Facebook fad involves filling the gap in with the fifth sentence from page 56 of the book lying nearest you).

This self-consciousness, I think, comes down to four things: 1) alienation is a defining feature of our post-industrial society, and making connections with lots of people feels counterintuitive; 2) the British have an intense sense of cringe, are not very good at brazen selfpromotion and prefer to show off through “effortless superiority”, which doesn't lend itself easily to social networking because it involves accomplishing amazing feats, seemingly with ease and without any desire for approval; 3) many of us have been brought up to believe that it is best to get on with things without making a fuss or seeking approval; and 4) many of us are aloof and distant and like to believe that we're better than everyone else.

Indeed, everything I'd read about Twitter made it sound as compelling as an infected wisdom tooth (did I mention that I have toothache?) and my first week on the site - which I spent watching a handful of its six million users variously complain about late couriers, describe their first trip across Tower Bridge in three years, talk about “eating the best tangerine in years” and discuss the merits of Canadian bacon v the British version - didn't make me see the appeal.

Frankly, I thought I'd finally reached that depressing stage of life when new technology stops having any appeal, and was about to conclude that while, in the past, the digital divide was between those with access to broadband and those without, the future digital divide would be between those who wanted to share banal information about their lives and those who couldn't face the prospect, when I suddenly found that I was logging on regularly. Twitter turns out to be quite addictive.

Of course, explaining the appeal of any technology is like trying to explain a joke: you really have to use it yourself to understand. But if I were to try to do so, I would say that Twitter's secret lies not in its similarity to but in its difference from Facebook's status updates. Unlike their Facebook equivalent, tweets can be directed at specific twitter users, people tweet much more often than they update their Facebook status, and it is much more acceptable to follow people you have never met on Twitter than it is on Facebook.

In practice, all this gives Twitter a fourfold appeal. First, because everyone is tweeting regularly, you feel like a spoilsport if you don't join in, whereas on Facebook - where the status update is just one of many functions - you feel like a twit if you do. Second, the banal thoughts of complete strangers are surprisingly comforting and compelling: it's like following a thousand mini soap operas. Third, as tweets are no longer than a sentence or two, it is not very labour intensive. And fourth, the problem of British reserve is solved by one of the country's most enthusiastic “twaddicts” being Stephen Fry, a man more British than the Queen. If he can bring himself to use it, then so can you.

www.twitter.com/sathnam

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