I am seriously dependent on the internet, and will make no attempt to deny that. If I’m on my computer (and if I’m home, the chance that my laptop is next to me is just about 100%), then at the very minimum I’ll have Internet Explorer and Live Messenger open. Yet, despite being online just about all of the time, I’ve always had an aversion to jumping on the bandwagon of the latest internet phenomena. Specifically, Facebook and myspace were two things that I resisted for years, always coming up with an excuse not to sign up even though it seemed like everyone else on the planet had succumbed to them. I don’t really know why I was so opposed to joining such sites; they just had zero appeal to me. I finally gave in and joined Facebook early last year and quickly realized that it wasn’t the evil entity that I had convinced myself that it was. I look back now and wonder why I didn’t sign up sooner; it’s become one of my staple sites and is open on a tab in IE more often than not (I signed up at myspace at about the same time, but still have no love for it. I probably check it once or twice a month, if that).

The Facebook success story has done nothing to alleviate my suspicion of new internet trends however, and I still find myself avoiding the newest fads (a word I’m reluctant to use, since more often than not they end up staying around). Twitter was one of the big ones that I stayed away from; I simply didn’t understand the appeal of it. Microblogging seemed pointless to me, since my blogs are usually about the size of term papers, and the conversations that people had over Twitter seemed like they could just as easily be done over IM, or txt, or any one of a number of other mediums. But despite its apparent pointlessness, I noticed more and more friends signing up for it and using it regularly. I eventually found myself checking my friends’ feeds several times a day, but still refused to actually sign up. Given Twitter’s undeniable popularity I figured someone out there had to be using the name Thesomeone already, so the other night for shits and giggles I went looking for such a feed. When I realized the name wasn’t taken I decided to grab it, but still told myself that I wouldn’t actually use it. My famous lack of willpower never fails though, and within hours I found myself adding friends to follow and posting updates, mostly about how I didn’t want to be posting updates. We’ll see if it becomes something that I use regularly, but so far I’ll admit it’s not as shitty as I had assumed it to be.

Given my surrender to Twitter, I found it absolutely hilarious that it was the subject of today’s Penny Arcade. Unlike Gabe, I promise not to tweet while carrying out any bodily functions.