I’ve been noodling around with Twitter for a few months now. Well, that’s not exactly true. I’ve had an account for months, but for the longest time, I didn’t do anything with it because I didn’t understand it. I kept reading articles and columns about Twitter, but it remained like calculus to me, except with calculus, I never had the breakthrough, while with Twitter, I had a “twepiphany” the other day (Twitter users like to create neologisms that all start with TW).

That’s not to say that I understand it completely. Actually, I think I might have been born 30 years too early to totally grok Twitter, but I am using my account now and I’m thinking about ways that I might be able to use it on behalf of my clients and to market the agency.

David Pogue, personal tech writer for the New York Times, had a very good article on Twitter today that explains what it is and what it does, but best of all, he offers some very good advice that, had I had it three months ago, I could have been tweeting already:

DON’T KNOCK IT TILL YOU’VE TRIED IT Of course, this advice goes for anything in life. But listen: even my own masterful prose can’t capture what you’ll feel when you try Twitter. So try it.

If you don’t get any value from it, close the window and never come back; that’s fine. Despite all the press, Twitter is still largely a geek and early-adopter phenomenon at this point.

DON’T USE THE WEB SITE I couldn’t believe that six million Twitter users lumber off to a Web page every time they want to send or read tweets. Turns out they don’t. About 70 percent use sweet little free programs that sit at the edges of their screens (or run on their cellphones, especially iPhones) all day. They have names like TweetDeck, Twitterfeed, Twhirl and Twitterific.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO READ ALL THE TWEETS It’s common to check out someone’s Twitter profile and read, “Following: 900 people.” Baloney. Nobody has the time to read all the tweets from more than about 30 people — at least, nobody with a life.

Clearly, these high subscribers just read the most recent ones, or skim for good ones, or use search.twitter.com to find messages on certain subjects.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO ANSWER ALL THE REPLIES If you have a lot of followers, you get a lot of replies to your tweets. Fortunately, this isn’t e-mail; nobody expects you to answer everything.

IF YOU’RE CONFUSED ABOUT REPLYING, YOU’RE NOT ALONE If you reply to one of my tweets, I can write back in either of two ways. I can reply as another public tweet, but of course nobody but you will have any idea what I’m talking about. (“@puppydog: Maybe in Montana!!! LOL”).

Or I can send you a private Direct Message — but then our dialogue may end. You can’t reply to my Direct Message unless I’m also following you (it’s an antispam measure, according to Twitter). Get it? Me either. Twitter Inc. says it’s working on fixing this and a host of other confusing elements.

USE IT HOWEVER YOU LIKE I’ve finally harnessed Twitter’s power for my own nefarious ends. I pass on jokes. I share little thoughts that don’t merit a full blog or article post. I follow links and track buddies. I un-follow people who are boring or post 50 times a day.

And I query the multitudes. Last week, I was writing a script for a TV segment, and needed a great example of “an arty movie that a teenage baby sitter wouldn’t be caught dead watching.” My followers instantly shot back a huge assortment of hilarious responses. (“Gandhi.” “My Dinner with André.” “The Red Balloon.”)

Other people plug their blogs, or commiserate, or break news; the first report of the plane in the Hudson came from a Twitterer. It’s all good.

DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE RULES Including mine. Use Twitter the way you want to. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re doing it wrong.

Oh, and one more tip: when you’re trying to get real work done, it’s also O.K. to close Twitter. It may be powerful, useful, addictive and fascinating — but in the end, it’s still an Internet time drain.

And be sure to watch Pogue’s very entertaining video on the page with the article.

In October 2006, President George Bush drew ridicule from left-leaning bloggers for attaching an article to the name of the most popular search engine:

One of the things I’ve used on the Google is to pull up maps. It’s very interesting to see — I’ve forgot the name of the program — but you get the satellite, and you can — like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It reminds me of where I wanna be sometimes.

While President Bush has demonstrated a general lack of concern about the privacy rights of individuals, but he might be concerned if he realized that The Google was logging his search terms and his movements around the InterWeb for the purpose of determining which of its advertisers might have a product of interest to the POTUS. And the Google product the prez likes to check out the ranch with — Google Maps — has just released a version that enables street-level images in which individuals can be identified, which has personal-privacy advocates crying foul.

President Bush might be concerned if he realized that The Google was logging his search terms and his movements on the Web.

The issue of privacy has led Ask.com, a relative late-comer to the search biz and the smallest of the leading engines, to offer a tool that supposedly allows a user to opt out of any tracking the engine might do. So far, Ask.com is the only engine to offer such an opt-out.

But the question of privacy and whether Google respects it is worth asking, especially as more Web users rely solely or primarily on Google for searches. A recent report by Web metrics company Hitwise revealed just how dominant the Google has become:

Google’s share of the market rose to 65.1 percent from 61.84 percent in the same month [November] a year ago, Hitwise said. In October, Google had a 64.49 percent share.

Yahoo Search was a distant second last month with 21.21 percent of searches, followed by Microsoft’s MSN Search, 7.09 percent; and Ask.com, 4.63 percent. The remaining 46 search engines in the Hitwise rankings accounted for 1.96 percent of searches.

But there is an easy way to still use Google but prevent it from tracking your movements and inferred preferences. Use the meta-search engine Zuula. Zuula simultaneously searches Google, Yahoo, MSN and a couple of other engines and returns results in an ad-free page that is tabbed for each engine. It also enables news, image, blog and jobs searches from its simple interface.

If you compare a search on Google with a search on Google using Zuula, the results will differ, mainly because they haven’t been skewed to sell you stuff based on where you’ve been on the Web.