Tread Heavily

While I was at PubCon, I was introduced to a new website/service/application called Twitter. In a nutshell, Twitter is a mix between blogging and chat where you have a very limited amount of characters to express yourself. To use the site, all you have to do is create your profile and start twittering. Unfortunately, if you want to have anyone actually read anything you twitter, you have to find followers. Otherwise, you’re talking to yourself, and that is never fun for long. How do you find those followers? That’s one of secrets of twittering.

When I started, there in my hotel in Las Vegas, I was all excited about this new thing. I was blogging, but I wasn’t twittering, and all the cool people were twittering. How could I get amongst the cool people? I sat there searching for names I knew, ran through my Yahoo! contacts, and entered random names, just so I could find someone who would listen to me, all to no avail. Eventually, I found in my notes where I wrote down Pistachio’s name and added her as someone I was following. Unfortunately, she was flying somewhere and wasn’t there to follow me back, so I was still in that same boat.

Fast forward a few days later. I get back in the office, and I see that Pistachio was now following me. By then, I found a couple of other people who I could follow, so it was at least interesting for me to sit back and watch the conversations fly by. Then, on that glorious Tuesday (known as Twitter Tuesday) Jeremiah Owyang published his legendary blog post, asking people to drop in their @name in the comments so they can follow and be followed. A Twitter Storm erupted and my followers list grew to around 40 people in just two days!

The effects of this was just mind-boggling. It isn’t that I, and others, now had a audience to listen to what we had to say, we had a community that we built on the fly where everyone could share what was on their mind right then and there. You can’t just blurt out anything that comes to mind as you really have to work at expressing yourself in 140 characters. As a result, the conversations became meaningful, personal, and overall supportive. This community needs no overseers and no participations is required. Just like in a physical community, you have your presence there and can contribute as much or as little as you like. The more you contribute the better you’ll enjoy it, but if you aren’t in the mood, you can just sit back and soak it all in. Or ignore it completely.

Now that I have been doing this for around a month, I have over 100 followers and am following just a few more than that. I have met and shared with some of the most interesting people, and have learned from some of the brightest minds. I have laughed at people’s jokes, I have donated to causes important to our community, and I have felt grief at the loss of a member of our community. And, I’d like to think that I’ve contributed in turn.

Now, don’t get me wrong, everything isn’t all roses and puppies. There are those in this community who seem to only be there to disrupt and who scream at the top of their lungs to be heard. Luckily, relief is only the click of a button away. When you block someone, you make sure they don’t see what you say, and you can’t see what they say.

The Future

I’ve been through how I got started and what is going on right now with Twitter. Now, I want to make a few guesses at how I will use it in the future. As a person who designs web sites and applications for end-users, I know I will start asking for feedback on designs, and even use it to solicit paid-for testers. I will use it for personal and professional research, and will even find more to follow who are SMEs in whatever career direction I try next. I will promote my blog, my business, and my ministry, and I will continue to answer interesting questions and offer support in whatever form it is asked.

In the middle of writing this blog, I got away from my desk for a minute and thought about what makes this community different from the others I am and have been involved in. What makes it different from the chat rooms of the early 90s where I spent so much time, when I should have been studying? I came up with two answers to that:

1. The Twitter community does not try to make itself into what it is not. There are no sub-groups, no fan pages, and nothing that separates the A-listers from the Z-list. The community is what it is, and it is what the community made it. It’s like the inventor said, ‘Here. I made this for you. Do with it as you will.’
2. The people. The people that use Twitter are some of the most forward-thinking people on the planet. They aren’t all young tech-heads and ultra-sexy Internet celebrities, they are just smart people who know a good thing when they see it. The way I see it, the Twitter community is the marrow in the backbone of Web 2.0 and beyond. They are the people that will push the Internet (and modern culture) to its next ‘big thing’ and beyond.

And you know what I realized? The community isn’t there because of Twitter. Twitter is there because the community needed it.

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