While celebs like Demi Moore and Hugh Laurie's pal Stephen Fry are Twitter enthusiasts, the House star has revealed he's baffled by the obsession with the micro-blogging site.
Speaking on BBC radio the 49-year-old actor said that although he has his own page on the site, he is "bothered by the social cost of every tweet". "As I look around my friends' tweets I see banality on all sides. I don't understand the purpose of it," he admitted. Referring to the word limit for posts, he added: "If people were able to take these 140 characters and develop a poetic Western form... that would be a satisfying thing. But that's not what I see when I read them".
Kingdom actor Stephen's Twitter page gained a widespread following after he posted a picture of himself stuck in a lift and twittered his way through the hour-long enforced incarceration, which made headline news.
At the moment Stephen has plenty of time to convince LA-based Hugh of the merits of the concept as they're currently seeing each other every day.
"Oddly enough, he now plays a role in this show Bones that actually shoots next door to House, so we wind up eating lunch in the same cafeteria," explains Hugh, who's complained that these lunchtime meetings are interfering with the American accent he's cultivated to play the role of the irascible doctor.
Despite their differences over Twitter, the pair – who worked together on Jeeves And Wooster and A Bit Of Fry And Laurie – hope to reprise their screen partnership whenever they get over being "hopeless planners".
So what's the story with Twitter…? In case you haven't already discovered it, Twitter is a free social networking service which enables users to send and read other users' messages.
These 'tweets' are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them. Since it launched in 2006, the service has become a hit with celebs.
