The Football World is All A-Twitter

These new technologies start out on the fringe as solutions looking for problems. Then they sneak up on you.

Twitter crossed that bar from the province of teen-agers and the empty headed, not necessarily the same people, who post vain and vapid microblogs of their action at a given moment.

Then Michael Lombardi put me straight. The former Oakland Raider front-office executive who now writes for The National Football Post tweets.

Tweeting is the act of posting 140 character entry on Twitter.

When Twitter was new and experimental, folks, like me, posted under a screen name...that whole "names were changed to protect the innocent" thing. But Lombardi tweets under his own name and as a front for The National Football Post.

That's different.

Eyes opened, I began to see that others are on Twitter and posting as their real identities.

Players agent Drew Rosenhaus tweets, as do his Redskin clients Devin Thomas and Rocky McIntosh and others.

Sports Illustrated Peter King tweets.

Local newspapers covering the Washington Redskins, New York Giants and Dallas Cowboys tweet.

NFL players Larry Fitzgerald, Champ Bailey, TJ Houshmandzadeh, Terrell Owens (25,499 followers), Chris Cooley, Mark Sanchez, Eli Manning (sorta) tweet.

Even the NFL tweets.

The media tweets to shill story that links back to the web site where value is created -- and revenue captured.

The players are mostly in the "what are you doing now" mode. Champ Bailey, 11:33 am, May 28: "itsucks when potato chip bags are half full!"

The fact that Twitter has attracted real people who tweet under their real names says there's a sea change for the platform.

Once, you didn't take Twitter seriously. Now, if you don't tweet, you aren't taken seriously.