“When Stars Twitter, a Ghost May Be Lurking,” says Noam Cohen in the New York Times.

50 Cent uses one. Britney Spears does, too. And the article goes on to name several people who do, and others who won’t, use ghost twitterers to connect with their fans. And before you go making fun of these twitterers, consider what you’d do if you were offered the job.

I put my unusually large foot in my unusually large mouth by saying things like, “Oh, that’s hilarious. Now the Queen has a twitterer? He must be a huge hit with the ladies— hello, I’m the Royal Twitterer” only to find out that a couple of people I know have been asked to twitter for the stars. And they’ve taken the job.

When they were teaching brevity in Berkeley, they weren’t thinking about Twitter, huh?

Anyway, my personal philosophy is that I wouldn’t take the job. If I ever come close, you have permission to shoot me, I told a friend. But in all seriousness, I’m a journalist and while the definitions of that may be changing, there are some traditional ideas I’ll hang on to, thank you very much.

Twittering for myself, well, I haven’t quite figured out how I feel about it. I joined fairly early on, in July 2008, and decided that I’d post an update once a day, like I do with my blog. But I realized pretty quickly that not only did I not like the medium, but that the endless chatter is super annoying.

Especially when some people actually post things like, “Goodnight tweeps. See you tomorrow” night after night. Every night. Yeah, kill me now. (But please, will you explain the purpose of that tweet before you do?)

Because I don’t like giving up on things (and people) before at least making an effort to understand them, I invited over a popular and well-respected social media expert who often gives seminars on the topic, and quizzed her on Twitter.

“You have to follow the right people,” she said. “You can get so much good information about a certain topic if you follow an expert. For instance, you could be the go-to India person. People would know that for news on what’s happening in India, you’re the person to follow. People follow me because they want the latest on what’s happening in social media.”

I liked that idea. Be scared, BBC. Be very very scared.

And so, as soon as she left, I immediately logged on to Twitter and started following this social media expert. Her next tweet, and I kid you not, was about how she was stopping on her way from a meeting to pick up food at a restaurant.

Sigh.

I’m not giving up yet, but I’m still waiting to hear what the big deal is.

So, Twitter. Positives and negatives. Discuss.