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"Write something cheery," wrote a friend who felt she could no longer handle the stress. She wanted to escape, and be allowed to do so. "Get a life; go Tweet," she advised.

That's when I realised how undersized my universe had become.

There is an entire community out there called the "Twitosphere", comprising more than 32 million (a jump from 2 million a year ago) "Twitterers", "Tweeters", "Tweeple" or people who "Tweet" around the world. Of these, 14 million are in the United States alone, which explains why Twitter is at its busiest when Americans are in their offices. Twitter is THE social-networking site of the moment. The Dalai Lama is one of the top celebrity Twitter feeds, followed by Britney Spears, Ashton Kutcher and his wife Demi Moore, and even Arnold Schwarzenegger. US President Barack Obama, the Web 2.0 generation's presidential candidate, created a Twitter profile to provide updates during his presidential campaign, though he has not Tweeted at all since he was sworn in. Even a primordial highbrow British institution like the Royal Shakespeare Company, which dates back to 1879, has its own Twitter site.

What's interesting is that it's not the teenagers Tweeting, it's people in their 40s, 50s or even the 65-year-olds outnumbering the teens. Republicans seem to use Twitter more than the Democrats. Their exchanges are short and sharp, though it is teenagers who are the angriest. For some people, Twitter is a place where information is exchanged, help extended, advice dispensed and humour, sorrow and hatred shared. For others, Twitter is a place to scream and let the world know that they are truly fed up. (There have been feeds where more than 100 of the allotted 140 characters were used for the "f" word.) In fact, some would even go so far as to say that both God and Satan are on Twitter.

There is extensive Twitter glossary that will help one navigate with ease and Twictionary and Twitionary are two websites tracking the new ungainly neologisms. There's Twexting: an act of tweeting via text message; Twitphilia: a compulsion to tweet; Twitanoia: an intense psychological aversion to all things Twitter; Ghost-tweeter: one who tweets for others; dweet: tweeting while intoxicated; drive-by-tweet: a quick post between tasks; politweet or politweeter: political tweeting; twaiting: twittering while waiting; twalking: tweetering while on a walk; tweetaholism: being addicted to the use of Twitter; twiking: twittering while riding a bike; twitterati: the A-list twitters; and twitterpated: overwhelmed by Twitter messages.

Twitter is not just a site where people share their most intimate and trivial existential details such as what they had for breakfast and whether or not they slept well the night before, but it has taken off as an alternative way to connecting and communicating with the world. Unlike Facebook, which by some measure is the most popular social-networking site on the Internet today with more than 200 million users worldwide, Twitter traffics in a different currency - namely people. It is a heady mix of messaging, social-networking, real-time conversation, micro-blogging and something called the "presence" or "followers" that can be sent either via the Net or the mobile phone.

If Facebook can be compared to a virtual mosque, then Twitterers are like the muezzins. Both Facebook and Twitter have been embraced and expanded at great speed by the 21st Century culture. And it is Twitter, not Facebook, that creates a media experience quite unlike anything that has come before, with its brevity, immediacy, intimacy, "ambient awareness" and the potential to break the communication moulds and barriers. People are realising that the power of Twitter is real and tangible.

This year, Twitter was given added respect as a communications tool to spread news and circumvent repression. After the major earthquake in Italy, Twitter was used to gather aid for the victims. It was used to share information on the emergency landing of a plane in the Hudson River, rally unrest in Moldova and the latest street protests in Iran. Three days after the elections and at the height of the street riots, a US State Department official requested Twitter to delay its scheduled maintenance so Iranians could continue using the site to tell the outside world about what was going on in the country where freedom of speech and mass media are repressed. It is another show of e-diplomacy that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been talking about regularly.

Created or "discovered" in 2006 by a 10-person start-up team in San Francisco called Obvious, Twitter recently brushed off Facebook's offer to buy it for US$500 million (Bt17 billion) in cash and stock. This, despite the fact that nobody, not even its founders, know what business model it should use to turn profits.

The world, like life itself, works in phases. Maybe it is a sense of isolation, alienation and the advent of powerful communicating tools for virtual networking that combine to make Twitter a sensation today. However, every clickety-click comes at the risk of increased misinformation, lost privacy, and perhaps even our sanity. Some people are so obsessed with sending texts via their mobile devices that they rarely look up to see the real world or real people.

"All other creatures look down toward the earth, but man was given a face so he might turn his eyes toward the stars and his gaze upon the sky," contended Publius Ovid Naso (43 BC to AD 17), a Roman poet considered one of the three top bards in Latin literature.

Nicholas Negroponte, the co-founder and director of the world renowned MIT Media Lab which created the "talking head" among other things, once said that he no longer answered his e-mail. Anybody wanting to see him could write him a letter, and if he felt like it, they could go out for a cup of coffee.

So, perhaps there is no real escape, and maybe one day, people will be calling for a Twitter-free zone because the world has Tweeted-out.