The Front Row with Tim Dahlberg May 3, 2011

One thing Ozzie Guillen has never had is a problem expressing himself.

In English or Spanish, often in a hybrid of both. In the middle of the fifth inning or in the manager's office after the game. To an umpire who doesn't want to hear him, and to the media which almost always does.

Just the kind of guy Twitter was invented for. Or not.

Give Guillen the chance to express himself in 140 characters or less and the next thing you know he's in the clubhouse, serving a two-game timeout for violating baseball's social media policy. His 129,000 or so followers may have been enlightened by his comments after being tossed from a game against the Yankees, but the White Sox manager seems to be done tweeting for now.

"I don't blame Major League Baseball for being upset with me," Guillen said. "I made a mistake."

So did Carlton Cole, the West Ham soccer player who took to Twitter to joke that England's game against Ghana last month was really a trap by the British government to find illegal immigrants. Cole later deleted the comment, but the damage had already been done and he was fined some $33,000 by the Football Association.

Cole's teammate Danny Gabbidon apparently didn't learn anything from the dustup. He was charged by the FA with "improper conduct and/or bringing the game into disrepute" over his April 16 tweet that used an expletive in response to criticism by fans after West Ham lost to Aston Villa.

"U will never get another tweet from me again u just don't get it do you. Bye bye," Gabbidon added.

If it was only that simple. Breaking up with Twitter is hard to do.

Tennis player Donald Young did it last week, shutting down his Twitter account for good after having to apologize profusely for an expletive-filled tweet telling his followers he was sick of the treatment he received from the U.S. Tennis Association over a possible wild-card entry into the French Open.

Young found out that the ability to speak unfiltered through Twitter can be dangerous in the heat of the moment.

"I think I'm done with that," he said. "It's brought me nothing but trouble thus far. I was good without it and before it, and I don't need to know what everyone's doing every 15 minutes."

The problem with most athletes, though, is that they're narcissists at heart and think fans want to know what they're doing every 15 minutes. They've built cults that are sometimes rewarded with nuggets of information like the one Serena Williams dispensed the other day. She announced to her 2 million followers that she hadn't eaten sugar for 24 hours and was going to bed so she wouldn't be tempted to have a cookie.

And, after being hounded for the last 18 months by the media to tell his deepest secrets, Tiger Woods took to Twitter a few days ago to provide the real scoop.

As in ice cream. Woods revealed that his favorite is vanilla with - gasp! - rainbow sprinkles.

That's more information than Shaquille O'Neal's 3.7 million followers have gotten recently. The_Real_Shaq claims to be "very quotatious" but he hasn't said a thing about whether he's recovered enough to play Sunday when the Boston Celtics begin their playoff series with the Miami Heat.

Being funny in 140 characters or less is tricky, as Montreal Canadien Max Pacioretty found out when he tweeted that "this game is longer than (Bruins forward Brad) marchands nose."

It wasn't long before Pacioretty was sending out a second tweet.

"I was trying to be funny earlier, and it didn't work," he said. "I apologize to marchand and won't try to be funny that way in the future."

Tim Dahlberg is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at tdahlberg(at)ap.org