Twitter.com A Real Tweet to Cat

I must be getting old.

The mass-appeal of some websites just completely escapes me.

For instance, I've talked about Twitter.com before. Politicians from both parties have glommed onto this technology in an effort to reach the mobile youth of today.

I read that Missouri U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill has almost achieved rock-star status on Twitter for all of her posts. She had 21,028 followers when I checked. And just last week actor Ashton Kutcher became the first Twitter member to have more than a million followers.

So what the heck is Twitter, you might be wondering.

Twitter is essentially a broadcast text messaging service that is designed to answer the question, "What are you doing?" Twitter participants can follow each others posts detailing their daily minutiae and their inner-most thoughts provided that they can document them within the space of 140 characters. That includes spaces.

We're not talking a lot of detail here.

The messages -- or tweets as they are known -- are apparently quite appealing to people with the attention span of a mosquito. I personally don't find most of the little things that I do throughout the day all that interesting, so why should anyone else care?

But, apparently millions of people are fascinated by these trivial tidbits of information shared by other people and have created accounts on Twitter so they can follow them.

That now includes my cat.

I was discussing Twitter with my wife the other evening and our cat Patches became fixated on the fact that the messages are called Tweets.

She -- our cat, not my wife -- seems to think it has something to do with the robins and cardinals that hang around our backyard. Even though I told her it had nothing to do with birds, Patches was insistent that I set her up a Twitter account.

She was pretty smug when I first tried to create her an account and discovered that "PatchesTheCat" was a screen name already in use at Twitter. If other cats were already on Twitter, then birds must be close at hand. Or at least that's what I deduced from her smug look.

So I helped sign her up as "PatchTheCat" and put an old Imac in her room that will allow her to pound out bits of kitty wisdom to anyone wishing to follow her fuzzy little thoughts. I guess she thinks that since I write a blog, she can write a micro-blog.

To access her random observations as an above-average house-cat you first need to create your own account at Twitter.com. After that is set up, you can find Patches on Twitter by doing a search under Find People for "PatchTheCat."

If you wish to have her tweets forwarded to your cell phone you can enable device updates. Keep in mind text messaging charges may apply from your carrier.

Or if you prefer you can follow her microblogs online at Twitter.com. If you Twitter her a question, I wouldn't hold my breath on getting any response back.

After all, she's a cat.