When Anastasia and I decided when she would return to the workforce as our family’s breadwinner, I expected that she would really miss her son. To try and soften her adjustment, I came up with the idea to surprise her with the blow-by-blow highlights of Daddy Daycare…in real-time. To that end, I grabbed a Twitter account for my son.

For those who may not know, Twitter is a micro-blogging site. That means that you can write up to a 140 character message letting the world know what you’re doing, sharing something interesting (or most of the time not-so-interesting), or just spamming anyone who cares to listen.

Over the course of a day, Alexei and I make somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 updates. If you would like to keep abreast of our doings, feel free to follow Alexei. On the other hand, if you don’t want to sign up for yet another service on the web, you can view the five most recent ‘tweets’ in the rightmost column of Alexei’s page.

In computer programming, there is something known as a “Hello world” program. It is a way to get one’s feet wet on the road to learning a new programming language. It also boosts your self esteem and makes you feel like you can actually do something, albeit as simple as printing one line that says simply, “Hello world.” Twitter is a unique web service in that 1- at its core it is very simple: a person writes a very short message and other people can choose to read it, and 2- it has an enormous user base. For these reasons and some others that would probably bore most people that may read this, writing a program that interfaces with Twitter is being called Hello world 2.0.

Here’s the clincher: out of the 30 or so days that I’ve been tweeting for my son, his mother followed him in quasi real-time once. All the other days I’ve printed her out a hard copy of the day’s tweets for her to read in one sitting when she gets home. So much for all this high-tech wizardry…

[NOTE] On the outside chance that this is the first time you’ve heard about Twitter and are thinking about taking it for a test drive, here is an informative quick read: How to introduce yourself in the social media. Once you get all set up, don’t forget to follow Alexei. Enjoy!