Although its quite hard to do, occasionally I pull myself away from this computer screen and have a non-wired life. Most of my family/friends are NOT digital marketing/web professionals but instead have very normal offline lives. These people are my test subjects to find out how skewed my life is towards the web. My standard question these days is "Have you heard of Twitter?" Not surprisingly, I often get very strange looks. Most of my non-digitized friends have no idea what Twitter is and when I try to explain it to them, they just dismiss me as Mr. Web Geek.
I love Twitter because it has enabled a new way of instant communication and provides for an infinite number of applications. Most of my personal Twitter usage up until now has been in my oriented around mass communicating with my very large family. A few uses that I have found interesting beyond the obvious news applications are...
marriage proposals (this one says that first she thought Twitter was "ridiculous" which is exactly what I thought the first time as well)
organizing protests of the China Olympic Games torch relay,
Professors keeping in touch with students
One of the coolest examples of Twitter that I have seen in action happened recently. My brother-in-law John Sampson lives in San Francisco and lives a very connected life as well. He was one of the creators of MyBlogLog (the widget on the right well of this blog), worked for Yahoo up until a few days ago (yes, another Yahoo defection), and is a big user of Twitter. After spending the previous 25+ years in Florida dodging hurricanes, he moved to "earthquake central" about two years ago. Recently, I received a one word Twitter from John....."EARTHQUAKE". Being concerned that they were new residents to San Francisco, I went to the TV and turned on CNN to see what was up. Of course, when I turned on the news, I saw a national weather map and a relatively mild-mannered anchor talking about gas prices or something similar. After about a count of 30 seconds, the news cycle kicked in and CNN "broke the news" about an earthquake in San Francisco! Umm, nope. I knew 30 seconds before CNN did. Take that Ted Turner!
