On Twitterings and Followers

I've been thinking a lot about these two aspects of the online and bloggy world:

Twitter - the extremely popular know-what-everyone-is-doing-anytime-in-40-characters-or-less social networking site.

I haven't been able to make myself join this. I am not sure what makes me not like it so much, but I have an inexplicable aversion to joining. I think part of it might be that I am fairly certain I couldn't come up with a single interesting thing to tweet about throughout my day. These would be typical tweets for me:

-sitting at my computer (still)
-wishing students would use the library
-reading a book (shocking)
-pulling weeds in the garden (or since I would be tweeting this, how could I actually be outside weeding?)
-should be cleaning my bathroom
-too lazy to make dinner
-flossing and brushing

Really. No really. That's what it would be like. Who would want to read that? I wouldn't. I rarely use the Facebook equivalent to tell people what I'm doing. I suppose these would be more useful and exciting if I lived a more useful or exciting life. For some reason, I'm just not sold on the whole Twitter thing.

Followers - and the widget to display them on blogger.

What is the purpose of followers exactly? At first, I figured it was some kind of "look at me, I have tons of people who think I'm awesome" - you know, a status symbol - the more followers you have, the more popular you are (which reminds me of my really non-popular high school days) (hmm, maybe that is why I don't like it) (this is probably not a grammatically correct sentence, but I had to add that Trish of Hey Lady! Watcha Readin'? wrote a most lovely post about this feeling). Maybe if I had 400+ followers, I'd want to display them too, but I don't and probably never will. And I honestly don't care (much).

But, then as I thought about it more, I wondered if it might be the way people keep up with new posts and such. Just because I am an RSS fanatic myself, doesn't mean everyone tracks blogs that way. I will shamelessly tell you that I have about 10 followers myself. I honestly don't know how they became followers either, since I don't have the widget. I'm impressed they took that extra effort to sign up with no real incentive.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll admit that I "follow" about 12 blogs. Why? Because I got extra entries in their contests. Shallow, silly, but true. I read these blogs the same way I do the other hundred or so blogs I subscribe to - on google reader. It makes no distinctions there.

So, here are my questions for you:

If you twitter, why did you start? Do you regularly update? Do you follow other people? Why?

If you have the followers widget, why? Why do you follow other people's blogs? Do you wish some blogs (ie: mine) had the follower widget in order to make it easier for you to follow?

OR tell me any other thoughts you have on these topics!