But, the vast majority of rational people who were still physically connected to the world around them, and who drew a 500 pixel line at a few Facebook peeks a week as their entire online social media experience, remained largely unaffected by this looming phenomenon.

So when exactly did it dawn on me with the blunt force of a sniped fail whale falling to its death that Twitter was catching fire in all the wrong places?

It might have been while on the phone with my mom last week when she dropped the bomb that "Dad is messing around with Twitter, following John McCain." I'm honestly not as shocked about my dad because retired people have the same affinity for useless obsessions as 14-year-old girls. But after McCain's technologically inept fiasco during the election, I find it hilarious that he is compelled to maintain such pretenses after the fact. And by hilarious, I mean frightening, like Mr. Burns on meth running around screaming "PORK ALERT!" every five minutes.

Or it might have been when this very site was still in its infantile stages, desperately sorting out job functions, copy flow, and how to assign content while still refreshing the homepage daily...and the only emails I would receive from our steadfast faculty leader emphasized the urgency behind fixing our busted Twitter feed.

Perhaps it was when three people in the same day told me that Shaq's Twitter feed is the funniest thing they've ever seen. Really? I just found that gopher doing the dramatic stare. Dammit.

"But it's really Shaq! He eats Sbarro at the Detroit airport!"

I'm tempted to join Twitter only to see if Webster's will soon tweet that "funny" has been expanded to include "that which mildly relieves boredom while on the crapper in O'Hare."

Setting aside those who readily embarrass themselves by foolishly thinking I am part of the clan and am therefore interested in sharing their Twitishes (that's right...Twitter + fetish...you heard it here first) with me, it appears Twitter is gaining practicality beyond the mundanely vain.

Many of my peers claim it is an invaluable reporting tool, able to locate otherwise inaccessible or completely unknown sources in minutes. For celebrities (and those that desperately want to think they are celebrities), it is a free and ubiquitous marketing tool.

The most interesting and unexpected evolution of Twitter's macro potential is its growing foothold in the search market. A Google search for "twitter replacing google searches" returns countless articles on the subject.

In his everything-Twitter blog "TwiTip" (is that like "twih-tip" or like Elmer Fudd ordering a tri-tip sandwich?), John Goalby paints a scenario where a young professional is racing the clock trying to finish a business presentation and needs some very specific stock photos. Google gives her nothing close to what she wants so she loads up TweetDeck and voila! A photographer friend offers to take some shots in an office and fire them over, saving the day and getting her the promotion. Very peachy.

Yet Goalby does raise some interesting points:

Google knows about that which has been written. People don't always write blog posts on everything they know - but they do store that information in their heads, ready to help others who are going through the same pain.

Search engines have no personality and don't engage in conversation. It could be considered an invasion of privacy if search engines used previous search information. There's no such expectation from public conversations.

Search engines will always rule fact-based questions. There's little reason to return more than one entry for these kinds of searches. After all there was only one First Place Winner of the Tour de France in 2008.

It may be said that you will get opinionated responses from Twitter. They are surely no more or less opinionated than blogs. In addition, the opinion can be addressed by other people listening in to the conversation.

The idea of Twitter as a human-powered search engine is intriguing, but what Goalby fails to note is that there are a lot of dumb people out there. I mean A LOT. This throws a little salt on his theory that "as membership in Twitter grows, the more useful it becomes."

The advantages inherent to the "conversational" search also carry a host of disadvantages, all tied to human error and lag time. Also, how does one judge credibility outside one's circle of friends (you know, the people you could just pick up the phone and call)? Blogs suck as a resource, but Google also ropes in results from all professional and academic sources imaginable. I'd get more use out of an article by a Stanford neurological researcher that I had to hunt down than an instantaneous response from @DaBrainDokta.

Full-circle: I think the power of Twitter fully dawned on me when I saw the almighty Facebook, which recently crossed the 200 million user threshold, roll out a universally panned update that tried to make the site a contender in the Twittersphere. By revamping its entire inter-user conversational architecture to more resemble Tweets, Facebook lost much of the refined personality that ignited its absurd overtake of MySpace.

Bowing to what this writer dubs "a massive anti-Twitter backlash," Facebook acquiesced to the ungodly amounts of virtual vitriol with some subtle rollbacks of the more Twitty features.

Still...self-promotion is rampant on Facebook and the number of quizzes, top 10 lists, and Cause requests can be maddening. I only find it truly obnoxious, however, when some Twit invades my news feed with 17 tweeted status changes, each no more than two minutes from the prior.

It is this Gatling gun of text tidbits assaulting our fractured brains like our own personal, Clockworkish byte-size dystopia that fuels my closing argument.

A CNN article published this week has the following lede: "Rapid-fire TV news bulletins or getting updates via social-networking tools such as Twitter could numb our sense of morality and make us indifferent to human suffering, scientists say." The piece, which cites a study done at none other than the University of Southern California, goes on to say that "the streams of information provided by social networking sites are too fast" for the brain's moral center to fully analyze before the next wave hits.

I can just see the next-generation of iPhones being issued with a Surgeon General's warning: "Quitting tweeting now may greatly reduce the risk of you becoming a heartless douche." The Chinese government and the Taliban will find new and endearing forms of Tworture, or perhaps Al-Qaeda will finally bite the bullet and sign up because, hey, a month of Twittering can drop out the moral base of a community in what would usually require YEARS of American occupation.

I say all of this in jest, of course.

(But seriously, stop the madness or we're all doomed.)