I don't want to share Twitter - go away!

Its praises are currently being sung by every newspaper, magazine, website and blog in the universe. A revolutionary micro-blogging site has truly hit the big time, following a meteoric rise of publicity, as its evangelical supporters wax lyrical about the phenomenon that is Twitter.

For those of you that have been living under a digital rock for the past two months, Twitter is a unique social networking site that lets users ‘tweet’ messages of 140 characters. By ‘following’ certain people, their updates appear on your screen, allowing you to keep track of what your friends (and favourite celebrities) are doing.

The site’s poster boy is English actor and television personality Stephen Fry, whose endorsement of the site has been truly remarkable. On his first show following suspension, Jonathan Ross interviewed Fry, who promptly started to discuss Twitter in front of the BBC’s millions of Friday night viewers.

But this, dear reader, is where (my) problem with Twitter officially started. Following that Friday night, Fry’s following on Twitter went from 50,000 to nearly 200,000 in a couple of weeks. The mainstream media clamoured to discover what exactly this Twitter was and I was suddenly left feeling like I’d been cheated on.

You see for those of us in the know before this, it was almost like we were part of a secret club. Twitter was cool – it was our thing that no one else knew about it – sub-cultural capital for the digital age. It’s the same premise as when the band you’ve been following for years suddenly becomes huge and people everywhere start humming the latest single – I don’t want to share Kings of Leon with the chavs down the pub – this is my thing, not theirs!

And so we come back to Twitter. Everyone now has a Twitter page, everyone is tweeting and the secret club that we used to hold in our metaphorical childhood tree house has now been bombarded by the whole world - we’ve been forced to share our favourite toys once again. Bah humbug.