From another night under Bangkok curfew; my inevitable social networking post

While crouched behind a tree inside Lumpini Park came the realization I'd advanced past the soldiers and was now between them and the back gate to the Red Fortress. While each rifleman had lines of fire clear of me, I'd gotten the impression in recent weeks that Thai Army gunfire can be downright friendly.

At that moment I caught sight of the Chinese-American photojourn I'd met up with while chasing the APCs up Sathorn Road. I crouch-ran over to his location and found him fiddling with his phone.

"What's up, are you good?" I asked.

"Yeah, I'm just reading your Tweets!" he replied.

Covering this story brought an end to my Twitter ambivalence. Although I won't be updating the world with snappy Haiku describing the tartness of my som tam lunch, it won me over as an effective reporting tool.

Not just by allowing me to report while reporting, via updates to an audience in real-time from the battlefield, but as a newsgathering tool.

I probably would have slept through the crackdown had I not caught UDDThailand's 4:01 a.m. update after a long night of editing, writing, posting and, well, Tweeting.

"Highest Alert! 30 APCs left Gierguy 20 minutes ago got in Expressway and will land in at Silom and unknown numbers... http://bit.ly/9X5BG," read the message from the Reds' United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship, or UDD. That strange bit at the end is a link to another website, abbreviated to accommodate Twitter's immutable 140-character limit. More than ever, brevity remains the soul of wit.

But at 4 a.m. I was not about to race off on another wild-goose chase by yet another shrill UDD wolf-cry.