Dear Aoir folk, I had a Morton's thai chicken sandwich for lunch. Delicious. Pretty trivial, eh? So why do people do it? I can understand retweeting 'important' or novel things: it is obviously a practice for garnering attention (see danah, Scott and Gilad's new DRAFT: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/06/18/understanding_r.html ). But why do people tweet what appears to be trivial statements? In the process of norm formation on twitter, I have been privy to more than a few conversations where the most common complaint about twitter is that twitter is for people who want to show off everything they're doing and, "I don't care what they had for lunch"; they are being exhibitionistic (which is a veiled term for unwanted self-exposure). Any thoughts? Here's some ideas: 1. People do not know what constitutes 'interesting' and they are trying. (The spaghetti on the wall hypothesis - throw it all and see what sticks) 2. People genuinely believe they are promoting something. 3. People want to make themselves accessible - mundane twitters help signify a sense of "connected presence". Also, have you followed anyone who was a trivial twitter, but ultimately stopped tweeting everything? Have you been privy to a norm-reevaluation (i.e. someone complaining about a tweeter that led to a change in the tweeter's behavior?). Did you tweet everything and then give up because it led to more bad press than good press? Was there an audience feedback in there, for example, people stopped following me until I started posting 'serious' things, like discussions about twitter, then it picked up? Take care, BERNiE (@blurky) Bernie Hogan Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute University of Oxford