For the past few days I’ve been playing around with the social site twitter.com. It’s an oddball kind of thing. The idea is to post little snippets of what you’re doing or thinking.

Then, anyone can subscribe to your “twitters” and follow what you’re up to. And you can subscribe to others’. It has hundreds (thousands?) of regular, everyday people twittering about their days. But it also has a fascinating smattering of tech celebrities.

I was turned onto to it by MacBreak Weekly regulars Merlin Mann and Leo Laporte (I’m following their twitters, sadly they’re not following mine).

There are many other tech celebs, too. There’s someone claiming to be Steve Jobs, and two people claiming to be Woz (there’s even a slight chance that one of them is real).

You can follow people’s twitters on the twitter.com website. But most people set it up to have them sent as text msgs to their phones, other mobile devices, or to their computer IM client. You can post twitters from each of those too.

The Macintosh connection here is an excellent twitter “client” called Twitterific. It’s an app that runs in the background, and pops up anytime one of your “friends” makes a comment. You can also use it to post your own twitters. It adds an item to the right side of your menubar, so you can easily open its window when the spirit moves you to tell the world that you’re headed out for a dentist appointment.

Anyway, the whole thing is oddly addictive. It’s a new way to be part of a distributed community.

If you decide to give it a try, put your twitter name in the comments, and I’ll add you to my list. And if you want to add me as a twitter friend my name is jackhodgson.