I recently succumbed to peer pressure and joined Twitter. Now you can be regaled with countless updates from me, Sonja, each day. Some of you might find this useful ("Look, there's a real person behind The Cultivated Word!") while others may not ("Why should I care what she thinks about Oscar Meyer's new ad campaign?"). The best thing is that the choice is yours--follow me on Twitter, or not.

In signing up for Twitter--which I firmly believe is an electronic, yet highly schizophrenic re-interpretation of high school--I realize that I'm opening the door to a torrent of judgment, both personal and professional, from all sorts of readers. I'm going to try to embrace that because I believe it will make me a better writer--somehow.

For those of you unfamiliar with Twitter, the basic premise is that you follow people's updates and ostensibly, people follow yours, too. When you sign up to "follow" someone on Twitter, they're notified by email. However, since Twitter has now gone from social media experiment to mainstream networking tool, following someone--anyone--can be interpreted as flattering, strategic, or both. "Following" someone gets you into a bit of trouble because the person being followed may think either 1) you care what they have to say or 2) you want to keep tabs on them.

"Following" someone on Twitter may have started out as a simple gesture, but in the ever-shrinking space of the internet, it can mean a lot more. So what if you want to get the benefits of following someone on Twitter--knowing what they're up to professionally, for example--without them knowing that you're following them? That's where TweetStalk comes in. The application allows you to follow someone on Twitter--and get all the "benefits" of that--without them knowing that you're following their every move. Freaky, huh? It's like that 80's song by Rockwell, "I always feel like somebody's watching me..." Nope, not good.

My take on it? TweetStalking is anti-social media. The whole point of sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, et cetera, is to socialize. I admit, sometimes that form of electronic socialization is a giant, juvenile, time-suck, but hey, it's just one more facet of social media, so why not embrace it? Don't let the anti-social stalkers take the fun out of social media sites like Twitter.