I asked in the office if we had any “twits.” One person said she remembered her mother called her one at appropriate times during her younger life. That probably happened to me too but that’s the wrong kind of twit. I was looking for officially registered “tweeters.” There were a few but I was by far the oldest in the office.

Is this new to you? The Nielsen Company recently did a small survey and found that www.twitter.com is the fastest growing member community message Web site in the country. During the past year, it has grown nearly 1,400 percent. There are now over seven million members. When you sign up, you can then post moment to moment anything from your day. Other members can sign up to follow you and your posts or you can ask to follow other members. Either of you can block the other from following.

David Gregory, the host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” lets you in on his day and gives other “twits” the opportunity to offer suggestions for questions.

If you want to know who some of the seven million members are, you go to www.wefollow.com and find members divided by categories — music, politics, technology, etc. You won’t find me at this Web site but you will find President Obama, Senator John McCain, Brittney Spears, The Shaq, MC Hammer, CNN, New York Times, Al Gore and Lance Armstrong to name a few. You won’t find us listed at this site but The Valdosta Daily Times is there as VDTimes. Search Valdosta and you will get a number of us.

The President is the number two “tweeter” in the country behind CNN with 510,071 followers. Joe Biden is 174 and 200 is a math teacher with over 12,000 followers.

In the office as we talked about this new phenomenon, one Times staffer sent me a link to a modern art painting from 1922 by artist Paul Klee called “The Twittering Machine.” The painting is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the painting, four birds are on a wire with their beaks open and to the right is a hand crank. Like some type of weird music box, the crank would obviously be used to make the birds tweet. Paul Klee’s painting is almost like a time machine of something he glimpsed from the future.

Today, the twittering machine is a real happening. It is more than a painting on the wall. You can turn the crank with a Web browser and a key board. Try it for yourself. It is easy to become a tweeter. Go to www.twitter.com and sign up. You can then follow, be followed and tweet to your heart’s content.