It's hard for me to see the Internet as very much fun anymore. Some days it's hard to think of it as anything beyond a series of tubes. The occasional widget comes along, however, that is actually quite delightful.

Enter: Twitter

The idea is simple enough. It's like a blog, only instead of paragraphs you get a few lines. An RSS feed of captions. You can update from the web, from IM or from your phone. It might seem like just another dumb way to keep in touch but its strangely addictive.

What really put it over the edge for me is twittervision. Independent of Twitter itself, twittervision is an interactive mapping service that displays tweets from the public timeline. Go visit, it's really cool to watch.