Twitter: It's out of this world!

Twitter is, like, totes the new Myspace. Everybody’s using it. Your grandma, aunt Milly, that cute girl in your science class, John McCain. Thing is ubiquitous. You can’t escape it. So if you haven’t capitulated yet, now is the time. Pretty soon, we’ll all be communicating in 140 characters or less, haunted by dreams of that cutesy error message. “Not the whale. NOT THE WHALE!”

So you can follow Lil Wayne, and you can follow Shaquille O’Neil (seriously, do it. You will not be disappointed), and now you can follow Astro_Mike, a real live astronaut named Mike Massimino, currently a member of the space shuttle Atlantis crew, en route to the Hubble Space Telescope to make repairs. Yeah. That’s right. Tweeting from outer space.

Last Tuesday afternoon, Massimino made history. Yeah, he entered the earth’s orbit, and that’s pretty cool, or whatever, but more importantly, he sent an 139-character post to his Twitter account, the site’s first extraterrestrial activity. Well, maybe. I mean, Dennis Kucinich does have an account (cue rimshot). Thanks, folks, I’ll be here all summer.

I can hear you now: “Okay, Elana, that’s great and all, but why should I care?” Well, my dudes, the answer to that question is twofold. First off, you can read material straight from the mouth (or fingers) of a real person in Earth’s orbit. That is pretty awesome. Astro_Mike ’s Twitter is a record of the day-to-day life of an astronaut. Secondly, I think this story speaks pretty strongly to the power of the internet and social networking devices to learn and link the entire universe (literally!) together. Or maybe not. What do you think?

(I wrote this for Science Buzz)