Five reasons why you should be on Twitter

1. Inside Access: If you ever wished you could be privy to unedited communication between your favorite players, this is it. Every day I get to read about Morris Almond and his rap lyric tweets; guys like Shaquille O’Neal and Charlie Bell making fun of Chris Bosh and Charlie Villanueva’s twitter followers contest; and insane, by the minute unedited, raw reactions from the NBA family to currently developing events. (Draft Night was much better because of Kevin Love and John Hollinger tweeting all night long) If you’re content to be dicked around by ESPN’s “In$ider” fee for access then you don’t need Twitter. If you want to go deeper (for free), there’s no better option right now.

2. Connections: Years ago it would be impossible for Mr.Joe Blow Fan to be in direct communications with the PR staff of their favorite team, National TV NBA analysts, well respected reporters, Bloggers, other Fans and the players themselves. Technology has afforded us this opportunity now. While you may wait half an hour to get on sports radio, or weeks for a written fan mail reply from a star today you get responses near instantly. I don’t ride around town in a horse drawn buggy, I drive a car that is itself not entirely reliant upon non-renewable fossil fuels. I move with the times, and my life is better for it. Twitter is a movement forward.

3. Speed: My cousin is a pretty big NBA fan, and he texted me yesterday about Gortat’s contract being matched by the Orlando Magic. That was breaking news for that day, for that afternoon. It was news that was a few hours old for me, though, because of my connection with the Twitterverse. How ridiculous is that? (over 30 hours ago was when I heard about it first) If you want the news as it happens, few things are faster than twitter right now. Right now when I started typing this everything was normal, now the Tweets are piling in about Boozer going on the radio in Chicago talking about a trade, and confirmations of Detroit local radio talking about a Boozer trade that’s going down. See how crazy this is? [Edit: Detroit radio tweets are speculative rumors]

4. Participation Optional: You don’t even have to tweet to benefit from Twitter – you just subscribe to a few random people that you know/like/wish to follow, and from there you slowly add more people that you read (from @(someone) messages) and before you know it you can sit at your desk at work pressing F5 and reading some crazy conversations. But it’s not even about that passive form of entertainment because of the . . .

5. People you meet: Really, using twitter has increased my productivity in networking with other NBA fans, bloggers, players, reporters and others exponentially. More so, I’m actually getting into non-homer discussions with fans of other teams as well. This off-season I’ve learned that I probably have more in common with the people I Tweet with than some of my own extended family members. While I used to previously view them as the enemy, I know have a personal affinity for New Orleans Hornets fans that just did not exist until Twitter. (Even the ones whose blogs I used to frequent and communicate with on other websites before, like Dimemag – they were still the enemy back then!) Now we occasionally share youtube videos of cats and talk about PC RPG user created mods. (You know who you are) How totally unexpected!

Bonus Reason: it doesn’t even have to be about sports at all . . . you can just use it to follow people you already know, or other celebrities . . . I know that I really enjoy Will Wheaton’s twitter updates, they are hilarious and usually involve some sort of The Simpsons reference. Also, Twitter is the destroyer of worlds.