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I have been tweeting now for the past day or so. It started simply enough when a friend opened a Twitter account for me and selected a few people I could follow. Two of those chosen, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and his archrival, Anwar Ibrahim, haven’t yet tweeted me to say hi, though I’m waiting.

Still, I validated my account and then launched into my tweets. Thankfully, a nice young woman with the moniker @takfasih (meaning “not fluent”) suggested I download a special application for BlackBerry users, which I swiftly did.

Having Twitter followers sounds ludicrous and perhaps is kind of crazy (like Orwell’s Newspeak), but there’s something compelling about tweeting. For a start, there’s a certain randomness and informality about the process. Yes, you tell people what you want them to know, but somehow it’s quite interesting and almost liberating to drop in short asides, separate comments about whatever you’re doing, the weather, the food and the scenery. It’s also extremely useful in spreading information, via the “re-tweeting” process I’m still getting the hang of.

As it happened, I was scheduled to visit Pekanbaru, Riau, for work so I tweeted throughout the journey — a kind of loosely linked, rambling stream of consciousness. I guess since I am at heart a writer, I enjoy tapping out words regardless of the medium. So what did I tweet about? Well, it started with the songs playing on the radio. There was a lot of Bunga Citra Lestari. In fact, I found myself tweeting almost the entire chorus of her song “Because I Love You,” though singer-songwriter Ahmad Dhani got a look in as well.

As we approached Soekarno-Hatta Airport, I noticed that the usual early morning crowd was substantially reduced. I suddenly remembered that it was the Balinese holiday of Nyepi, so I tweeted about the half-empty airport terminal and the Island of the Gods. Normally these sorts of observations would go into one of my trusty notebooks, but Twitter seemed just as handy. By now, I was getting hooked and it was a slight struggle to turn off the BlackBerry as I boarded the Garuda jet.

Thankfully, the flight was quick. On landing in Pekanbaru, out popped the faithful BlackBerry and I was back to tweeting, though I suspect no one noticed my absence! Pekanbaru became the next subject. I described its broad, neatly swept streets and boulevards. I began sending out lots of individual but interconnected tweets about the city, the province of Riau, the local economy. Did you know Riau is the largest producer of crude palm oil in Indonesia — at almost 2.1 million metric tons, some 30 percent to 40 percent of the national total? Well if you were receiving my tweets, you’d have learned that, as well as the fact that the local ikan patin dish is very tasty.

Similarly, I learned that some people in Riau, in the coastal town of Bengkalis on the Strait of Malacca, until very recently used Malaysian ringgit as well as rupiah. It’s these kind of small details that I really find fascinating as I crisscross the country.

Twitter’s 140-character limitation has its benefits. It means you have to be economic — almost poetic — in your use of language. Indeed, a tweet, at its best, is somewhat akin to the Japanese haiku: slight, open-ended and thought-provoking. Having said that, I find I cannot work with abbreviations. I’ve been conditioned by decades of column-writing to create sentences. I need nouns, verbs, periods and commas. The training is too deeply embedded.

In this respect, maybe the comment from a follower that I was “so ancient” rings truer than I’d care to admit. But good grammar is something we should never compromise on, even on the pain of death or being “un-followed.”

Personally, I most enjoyed the way I had to make an effort to really observe whatever was going on around me while also trying to figure out a way of describing what I’d seen or done. Sitting in the front of a brand-new Lion Air Boeing 737, I found myself fascinated by the deep ruby-red hue of the leather seats and the faux mahogany-wood veneer used on the folding tables. Mmm, very “Austin Powers,” I thought, an observation that was quickly transmitted via Twitter to the world. Frivolous, yes. But it’s profoundly human and humanizing too. Twitter has revolutionized communications, and in effect politics, from Washington, DC, to Tehran, Jakarta to Johannesburg. It’s hard to imagine what could possibly come next, but rest assured this is just the first of many wonders.

As I returned home to Jakarta and finally laid my BlackBerry down, I sent out a good night tweet, saying that I had my share for the day. Moments later, I received an ominous reply tweet from an old friend, the Malaysian youth leader and politician Khairy Jamaluddin: “Oh, it’s just begun my friend. Twitter is Hotel California.”

Karim Raslan is a columnist who divides his time between Malaysia and Indonesia.