My Week in Twitter
By: Shelly Brisbin
Like a lot of bloggers and podcasters (no really, almost everyone I know on Twitter seems to be one or the other), I’ve succumbed to the allure or Twitter. I haven’t been able to bring myself to call what we do on Twitter “microblogging”, but I may be changing my mind. Twitter has certainly begotten a lot of interactivity, enthusiasm and community-based effort that has resulted in good things happening. These represent values prized by bloggers, and made possible by that medium.
Last week was one of those amazing times for me on Twitter, when examples of its power to connect people were everywhere.
On Monday the folks in my Twitter circle began counting down the days, hours, minutes (?) until Steve and Maureen’s baby was due. Steve’s a prolific Twitter user, and I chat with him several times a day. Every time a new tweet from Steve came over the line, I checked quickly to see if this was the moment that he would leave work to join Maureen for the birth of their first child. As the week wore on, I felt bad about asking “any news?” because the baby had apparently decided the time was not right. Since Maureen is also on Twitter, we awaited her messages, too. “What are you doing?” indeed! I posited that if Maureen would only let Steve know by Twitter that her contractions had started, the suspense for the rest of us would be eliminated. No comment from the parents-to-be.
On Friday, Steve’s announcement winged its way into my Twitter client: “We’re having a baby.” We knew he wouldn’t let us down. We knew that before he put his car in gear to rush to his wife’s side, he’d alert the Twitterverse. We sent him off with best wishes and prayers for a safe and easy birht. As it turned out, 24 more hours would pass before Steve had more news for us. In the interim, my home Internet had gone out, and I felt profoundly out of touch until we managed to get back online, just in time to read the news that Rebecca Blair Loopipe had entered the world. By yesterday, we had pictures!
Also last week, Matt wrote in to say that his grandfather had died, and that he wouldn’t be doing his podcast this week. Friends offered condolences to Matt, and one quickly spoke up to say “I’ll do your show for you.” another friend, and then another chimed in. It was a joke at first, but within 15 minutes, and with Matt’s blessing, five of us (including Steve and Maureen, as it happened) had agreed to use Matt’s format, his bumpers and effects, and his feed to produce an episode of The Redboy Podcast. We jumped off Twitter and into email to plan and ship files around, then recorded the show via a Skype quad-ender (each participant recording his or her own audio). The instigator of our group took on the job of editing, and within a few days of Twittering our offer to keep Matt’s weekly show on track, we had published an hour-long episode.
These aren’t the kind of stories you read in business books, or hear about during presentations at technology conferences. They are utterly homegrown, and utterly human, not commercial. But the accessibility and community spirit they suggest will be just as crucial to those who have larger, more mercenary goals for their Twittering, or who see the service as a way to stay connected in real time with “big ideas”. This stuff is pretty cool.
-shelly
