Thank you Twitter, for making it easy to stay connected

What would I do this Thanksgiving if I didn't have Twitter

It's that time of the year.  The time when relatives and friends stumble through illegible recipes, search for the best shopping deals and share what they are thankful for.

While I don't use recipes and I do not pray to the Black Friday gods, thinking of something that I am thankful for was easy -- I am extremely thankful for Twitter.

I raise my glass to the single social networking site that kept me informed with up-to-the-minute details from friends to news sites and celebrities.

Twitter has firmly secured itself as the first platform I check in the morning and the one I refresh throughout the day. Sometimes I even use the time I last refreshed my page to determine what time I must have fallen asleep the night before -- it's frighteningly accurate.

Thank you Twitter for becoming  a medium where I can write to anyone from my local district supervisor to my favorite journalists in New York or celebrity chefs like Fabio Viviani.

Twitter, you have connected me to people that I never would have thought would respond to comments I made.

If it weren't for you Twitter, I may have learned about the death of Osama bin Ladin with all of the television watchers -- a world changing 8 minutes after the news broke on Twitter.

I am thankful for the unlimited amount of snark and sarcasm that bounds from my feed and gives balance to the 60+ hard news sources I follow.

And people can continue the debate of Facebook versus Twitter based on so many qualities and features, but one of the greatest beauties of Twitter is that people don't expect you to follow everyone forever. If you delete a Facebook friends, you are essentially declaring war. But Twitter was built for change and flexibility. You follow certain authorities on soccer during the season, and certain brands during the holidays, but no one gets their feelings hurt if you stop following them after a slog of tweets that didn't move you in the least. This gives tweeters a lot more freedom to follow and drop people as it relates to their life and interest.

Twitter is the TiVo of the internet but, frankly, I think Twitter is better than a DVR because no one is deleting my Antique Roadshow on Twitter.

And the hashtags. I will admit it, I had a hard time committing to those silly pound signs, but you also won me over both as a means to organize information for Twitter searches and as a method of categorizing the preposterous. #truestatement

When I read the numbers of how many others have fallen in love with speedy responses and democratization of broadcasting news, I couldn't be more proud.

I remember, back in 2009, when Jack Dorsey told me about you. He was just the archetypical entrepreneur with a MacBook and a dream, and I was posing the standard retorts like, "Who cares if you ate oatmeal for breakfast?"

How naive I was.

Little did I know that the Twitter community I curated for myself would become so much dearer than the obligatory Facebook friends I've collected.

So, while my friends are busy drying out the turkey and Googling what a 'roux' is, I will be refreshing my Tweetdeck and enjoy the breaking coverage from Tahir Square just as much as the drunken updates from dinner tables around the nation. Happy #Tweetsgiving.

Image Source -- Fohboh.com