Twittering and my digital footprint

On Friday afternoon, while at the GIN conference, a fellow 20 -something year old teacher turned to me , after a particularly good workshop session, to say that she really felt the urge to twitter. I smiled at her. I realized that she was talking about doing something on her computer. I remembered hearing the term twitter in class but couldn't quite remember what twitter was about. From the context of our situation I assumed that she meant online chatting. I tucked the twitter encounter in the back of my head and decided that I would have to investigate twittering in the future.

To learn more about twitter go to www.en.wikipedis.org/wiki/Twitter

On Saturday, after attending the GIN conference, I decided that I really wanted to hear what other people were thinking about the conference so I did a google search. I found Dennis Harter's comments on his twitter. This was just too coincidental. I decided to go to the twitter website and sign up. I thought about how this would affect my digital footprint. Since I joined up for our tech classes my footprint has increased dramatically. Now when I google myself I get three pages of results when previously I has about three posts in total. I thought about what Silvia said. Maybe increasing my digital footprint is a good thing. I am out there and connect with the world on the web!

When I signed up for Twitter I was asked to fill out the typical information one is asked when joining a social networking site. This time when I was asked to type in my e-mail account and password. I thought, I don't want Twitter to go through my e-mail. I'll just give them a fake password. My strategy didn't work. No password no Twitter. Then I was asked to set up a user name. Again I paused. Is this the kind of tool where I want people to know who I am or should I assume an alias? Should I set up a special e-mail account that I use only for the specific purposed of registering to join networks? What's a person to do?