Twitter has officially taken over.

I’m not really sure how or why but there is talk of Twitter, “twittering” or “tweets” everywhere. I have a Twitter account and I’m proud to say that it doesn’t consume my life…at least not yet.

Apparently because of this I’m behind the times. (And if YOU’re not on Twitter, then you’re seriously not with it.)

Its popularity increased earlier this year when all the celebs began to “tweet.” Even the old ones! I guess America was surprised to know that Barbara Walters could use a computer.

Twitter has become what all other social networking sites dream to be: phenomenally used worldwide and all over the news. Its verbs have quickly become more acceptable to use than ones like “Facebooking” or “MySpacing” and I wonder why. Social networking is the only way to go with friends, family and co-workers.

The only reason I can decipher is that nobody is truly interested in verbal communication.

Now, this has been happening since our cell phones had the capability to text message. It is undeniably easier and at times more productive to just send a quick text confirming a meeting or a date. But, I’ve gotten entire stories via text message. I’ve had “one text” take up seven text messages. SEVEN.

Now that’s just unnecessary.

From text messaging, our anti-social eyes were opened to social networking sites like Xanga and LiveJournal where you can tell everyone (and I mean everyone) about what’s going on in your life. No need to write letter or call. All anyone needs to know is the URL and they’ll never have to actually talk to you again.

Social networking transformed from the traditional journals in the more complex MySpace and Facebook and then the world changed.

Three years ago in San Francisco at a podcasting company called Odeo, Inc., in an attempt to “reinvent themselves,” an idea was born: to use SMS to tell small groups what you’re doing at the time.

Alas, Twitter.

Fastforward to now, every person in the entire world has a Twitter account. You can log on to see what P. Diddy (or whatever he calls himself now), Sarah Palin and Ellen DeGeneres are doing at this very second. All of your friends can tell you the food they’re craving and can even respond to direct messages from you.

What a wonderful world we live in where we can be as lazy as possible. Now we can know everything about everyone, but we won’t ever actually talk to them about it. Even if you’ve never met this person before, you can know everything about them, at least within 140 characters.