Not on Twitter yet? Think it's a pointless waste of time? I've got an inkling as to why -- and how closing your eyes may help you get started. The first time I saw Twitter, I thought the same thing -- "this looks really dumb."

Twitter's single biggest barrier to entry and reason for not sticking around may be the 4 words that appear above the form where you enter your tweets: "What are you doing?" If your Tweets actually answer that question, it probably is a pointless waste of time, both for you and for anyone who follows you.

Very few people care that you're waiting for the toaster, scratching your dog or cleaning the lint out of your navel. The 4 Words create the impression that that's what you'll be reading about if you join, and encourage people to tweet that sort of thing once they do.

Bad idea.

I can only guess that when Twitter was created, the creators figured it'd be used by people who were interested in reading those kinds of inane details about their friends. Fortunately, many of their members had enough vision to overlook The 4 Words and say interesting things instead.

One of my favorite Twitter "friends" is the famous copywriter @michelfortin. He tweets a pleasant blend of links to great articles and resources on internet marketing, and interesting personal stuff (yes, it's good to tweet some personal stuff, and long as it's interesting personal stuff).

Twitter fills a gap that blogging doesn't handle well -- it's the perfect way to share information that's too short to bother writing a whole blog post about.

Twitter really needs to let go of "What are you doing?" and replace it with something like "What do you want to say?" or "Say something interesting:". Until they do, if The 4 Words are what's stopping you, just close your eyes and start tweeting.