Twitter is the New Gate Jumper

March 12, 2007 · Comments

Idea In the old days, email became the great leveler. If you had email, you could be reached. No more secretary to block things. Then came blogs. People could connect to people by learning more about them through their blogs.

And now Twitter.

Today, I tried an experiment. I asked my Twitter list (I have 429 subscribers, but only 238 followers) to send me their personal blog RSS feed. I thought I’d see who responded. Not counting people who KNOW that I subscribe to them, I got over 40 responses.

SEVERAL of those responses are from people I really respect, admire, and who I’ve followed in some way or another since getting into this space. Can you imagine that? People I consider rockstars and heroes dropped what they were doing, and sent me an email giving me feedback to a request I put up on Twitter.

Twitter connects you to the PERSON not the business

Even more than a blog, Twitter is currently (because you can see that coming soon: Pepsi has a twitter! cough cough) the place where a human can connect to a human and make an impression.

Boy, sounds like good old relationship making to me. I’m Twittering with some of this time’s most fascinating personalities and rockstars, and it’s exciting as hell to me that we can share information, ideas, and potentially much more, just from a quick blast of 140 characters of text.

It’s okay if you don’t get it.

Chris Brogan is Community Developer for the Video on the Net conference as well as Network2, your guide to long tail Internet TV. He is also co-founder of PodCamp.

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  • I love Twitter. Keeps me more connected than anything else I think. But it all depends on how people use it.
  • It's broadcast IM. I can see how it would be useful for a disparate workgroup or fun for someone with a lot of friends. I don't have a lot of friends and I'm the High Plains Drifter of proposal writing. Hence, not my bag. I've signed up and dropped off twice because I found myself using it to vent to...well, essentially no one.

    No offense, Chris.
  • Ok thanks Chris. Between being in a call centre at work and a 7mth old at home, sometimes I don't have time to really investigate the thing. So, you're saying it's like MSN messenger, but to the nth power?
  • Chris -- Just got back from sxsw and you've said my piece for me, better than i could. Enabling real-time "chillin out" with people you admire, enabling 1-to-many connection... I think the gut-level appeal of twitter goes beyond any of its (very real) utility and into some basic human need for tribal connection. I'll elaborate in a blog post but just sayin' thanks for a very clarifying post. (Now I'll go add you ;-)
  • This is water cooler meets snacking. It's the update/gossip/what's up? conversations in small, finite doses, across the miles that separate us, yet it connects us. Easy to update, easy to connect, easy to help out friends. I like it because it makes me feel I'm hanging with my "peeps" even when I'm really picking up kids, doing projects, etc.
  • @Justin: I think you've hit on something important regarding "in" vs. "retro" and how quickly humans are adapting. There's a very cool movie called "Waking Life" in which one person philosophizes on this. He observed that "ages" (Bronze Age, Iron Age, etc.) used to last much longer. But as humanity has progressed, the time of those "ages" continues to shrink. Not so long ago we had the Industrial Age. Then (within many people's lifetimes) we saw the rise of the Information Age. We're already starting to identify the precursors of the "age" after that (I believe many people refer to it as the "Medical Age" or the "Longevity Age" when medical advances are happening VERY rapidly). So the character in the movie posits that in a short time we may seem humans mentally "evolving" at the rate of several "ages" per lifetime. Yep, we're constantly evolving.

    So even within the Internet age, we've gone from email to the Usenet "age" to the Internet, to the Dot-Com boom, to the Dot-Com Bust, to the rise of social media, and now already beyond it with tools like Twitter that push the concepts of social media beyond what MySpace and the like ever conceived.

    Now if I can just get Chris to update his copyright to 2007, we'll enter yet another age. ;-)
  • Yeah, can't wait for @billclinton to read my blog. I think we're all traipsing down some Twitter garden path. I can see the press two months from now... "A-list bloggers taken for big new media ride."

    MSM will be laughing their asses off at us - again.
  • Chris,

    This is really helpful! I made you a screencast of the twitter screen so you if you have to unplug - you can have something to look at.
  • "Twitter connects you to the PERSON not the business"

    Chris, I love this! I would rather connect with the "PERSON" any day. I tired of trying to connect to the business.
  • Twitter is my new addiction. I am not sure where I would be without it. The Big T keeps me up to date with what is going on with my friends. I have never been any good at communicated via instant messenger. Never can remember to turn the damn thing on.

    My fear now, and maybe I shouldnt say fear, is that the market is going to flood and people will disperse.

    What is the next big app?
  • Tim- It's two way conversation, not a page. It's not unlike the wall, but mobile-IM-web all in one. Does that help?

    Karen- I never worry about that. It's a stream. We can dip in, take out, and move on.

    I get complaints all the time, but usually from people who don't have many friends listed so it looks like ALL ME. : (
  • Never saw the original request (working and haven't read back posts in google reader yet), but DID see your blog post link IN Twitter just now...hehe.. so here's my feed to my personal blog kcardoza.com: http://twentyfifthhour.blogspot.com/feeds/posts....

    Just a thought. Wondering if anyone else sometimes fears being a Twitter Pest? Sometimes I catch myself holding back on sending another tweet if I've sent a few in a row without others sending some in between. It's kind of like applying the rules of conversation and not wanting to capitalize on the conversation too much. Could be that whole thing of not wanting to be un-"followed" for posting too much for people to weed through. (Much like those podcasts that I unsubscribe to because they're over an hour and I can't possibly get to everything with them taking up so much time/space.)
  • Ok, so I preused, but before I sign up on this, can you make clear to me how this differs from myspace or facebook or Hi5 or Friendster? Ok, the last two are really crap and are therefore a bad example, but...
  • I've never even heard of twitter beyond this blog. I guess I should go check it out...
  • In the *real* world (here at work) we are struggling with trying to build teams... but everyone has their own office ==>cave. So what we have done is co-locate all of the member of a product development team into one, open space. No offices... no cubicles. You know what? Communication is spreading rampantly between the team members and the project is (finally) moving at warp speed!
    The reason I give this example is that this is what I see twitter as. All of a sudden, I feel like I've been co-located in a common space with all of the rockstars of new media... with every twitter, one of you is picking your head up from your desk and contributing a bit of communication to the rest of the team... and I am learning one heckuva lot!
    (Now if I can only find a way to get more of the rockstars to follow me, too!)
  • If I change "get it" to "chooses to use it," would that work? : )
  • I'm with Justin ... I'm not big on the "get it" or "doesn't get it" expression ...
  • Chris, I don't know if I was included but I'm sending you this on the off-chance I was. feeds:http%3A%2F%2Fwesak.blogspot.com%2Ffeeds%2Fposts%2Fdefault
  • First of all, cool photo, hehe.

    You know what I was thinking today? We're using Twitter as a virtual office space. A lot of us work from home. Before twitter we would be somewhat isolated, but now we have a way to hang out around the virtual coffee machine in the morning and talk about whatever we please. I'm 5000 miles away from you but I can reach you just like if you were in the next office.

    It relates to what you're saying in your post. No matter where you work (what company or what physical place), we can all get together as equals, 140 characters at a time.
  • Chris, I was thinking the same thing. In Naked Conversations, Scolbe and Israel say (not a direct quote) "it does not matter how many subscribers you have, but who subscribes to you." With Twitter, you can add some A-listers and they will add you. Their once illusive attention is now yours. I fear that we are in honeymoon stage of Twitter, and the sweet spot we are in right now might not last tool long. Someone posted about the Dunbar number and Twitter today. If Twitter is the next iteration of blogging, it might have some of the same problems as blogging did, and it will be interesting to see it shakeout.
  • Phil-- Interesting. I think you might be right about that! We did skip the TXT revolution. But remember, TXT at its best is still 1:1, right? Twitter gives us the "illusion" of 1:many. But you're right. Good point to remember.

    Andrea- I could see you saying that.

    Justin- The future *is* retro. : )
  • Ok. i just "twittered" this but - i think twitter has really exploding in america/canada etc similar to the way that just standard TXT messaging did in europe that never really caught on in the states. We have been throwing texts around for years. The thing about twitter is the "conference-mode" to it plus the natural ability on the whole to filter "in" the people you wanna holla at.
  • I love how you say, "It’s okay if you don’t get it." I say that to other librarians a lot when it comes to technology, because even just knowing about the technology gets two toes in the water. :)
  • Uh oh... Twitter is the latest "thing" that people "don't get"...

    Which means, if I "get it"... it must be old news by now.

    Where's the NEXT big app?

    (At some point, we'll all evolve so fast that the future will be retro.)
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