I understand that Twitter is the hottest new social media thingy going, even though it doesn’t make any money — except for goo-gobs of venture capital.

I’m on Twitter —marginally. I mean, there are these people I don’t know who “follow” me, which is creepy, and in return, I “follow” other people I don’t know, which is less creepy but still somehow unfulfilling. And I’m a big-idea kind of guy, so 140 characters is a real struggle — it’s not even a decent introductory sentence’s worth of words.

OK, so maybe I don’t “get” Twitter the way I “get” LinkedIn, but I read about something in the Miami Herald this weekend that I truly believe would enable me to finally “grok” Twitter. It’s called Botanicalls, and for just $99 you can get tweets from your tulips, messages from your mums, IMs from your impatiens. Of course, you have know how to solder and do some computer programming, so it’s not exactly a turn-key product.

Jill Rosen, the reporter who wrote the story for the Baltimore Sun, recorded this heart-breaking series of tweets from the croton in her office that is rigged with a Botanicall outfit.

On Friday, she received this message from her plant: “Water me, please.” But Rosen was too busy to check her Twitter account, and went home for the weekend, leaving her vexed vegetable untended. The pitiful perennial sent another message over the weekend: “URGENT!” But Rosen was too busy having fun to heed the desperate, all-capped and emphatically punctuated cry for help from her suffering shrub.

On Monday morning, though, when a chastened Rosen finally read the tweets from her parched plant, she raced to give the dessicated croton a drink of water, after which the plant really laid it on thick with a snarky “Thank you for watering me!”

Who needs that kind of crap from a plant when I’ve got friends on Facebook whose inane messages and SuperPokes I ignore for weeks.

I think I’ll save the $99 and just follow Rosen’s croton on Twitter.