Status Consciousness

This morning's column, like an increasing number of my Thursday pieces, started out as a blog post.

I thought I'd write a short bit about the art of writing a clever Facebook status update. I'd seen this form of concise creativity take off on that site (especially after this Palo Alto, Calif.-based social network stopped requiring status updates to begin with the deadening verb "is"). I'd been both amused by my friends' wordplay (how much time does Amy Argetsinger put into finding song lyrics to quote?) and challenged to come up with my own.

Then I realized how a sort of collective conversation could emerge out of these little snippets of text after The Post won six Pulitzer Prizes this spring. One after another, co-workers changed their status messages to some variation of "I'm proud to work at the Washington Post." (My next update: "Rob loved reading his fellow Postal workers' ecstatic status updates.")

Not long after, I finally decided to make some serious use of the Twitter account I'd opened last summer. And once I latched onto the (possibly insane) concept of writing a column in Twitter-compatible 140-character paragraphs... I had no choice but to go ahead with the idea.

So there you are.

In case you're curious about the Twitter users I noted in the column, here they are:

* The marriage proposal
* The affirmative response
* The briefly-imprisoned Twitterer
* "Darth Vader"
* "Metro"
* JetBlue
* Barack Obama
* Hillary Clinton
* And then there's me

(It is not true that I wrote this entire post just to drum up more followers for my Twitter feed; if you do choose to follow me, I just hope you're not too bored!)

Do you post status updates anywhere online? How often do you write new ones?

Let's talk about this during my Web chat today, starting at 2 p.m. If you forget to add that to your schedule, don't worry--I'll post a reminder about it on Twitter.