Thursday, January 10, 2008

A Twitter Dilettante's (Me) First Tweetup With Susan Reynolds

I just got back from a Twitter meetup ("Tweetup") at Jimmy's in Herndon that Shashi gave me a heads-up on -- the featured attraction was Susan Reynolds, whose social media-enhanced battle with breast cancer was just written up in today's Washington Post.

As I've noted before, I'm still a Twitter dilettante -- I don't update all that frequently, and I've currently only got 21 followers and 14 people that I follow (and most of those folks are lurkers). But I'm still interested in the phenomena, and how people find ways to make it useful.

Had a bunch of conversations about different aspects of social media, blogging, New Media Jim, Second Life, the navel-gazing nature of the contemporary social-media-o-sphere, the DC tech community (as compared to that of, say, Boston, NYC, or SF), etc., and it was definitely intellectually stimulating (though, for my part, all I have to do is regurgitate the conventional wisdom and hot buzzphrases to feel intellectually stimulated).

I must admit, though, after 2 hours of trendwatching and futurecasting and social media pund-ification, I was ready to clear my head. I was going to stop by Carpool, though it was dreary enough out that I just decided to go home.

Also, even though I did meet a bunch of interesting folks tonight, I'm not sure how, or even if, I will be growing my Twitter contact list. I guess I'm still not sold on the whole "ambient intimacy thing." We'll have to see how that goes.

3 comments:

Donna. W said...

Twitter? sounds like some kind of partner-swap club!
ROFL

S.G. Chipman said...

Have you seen what Jason Garber and co. have done? Two sites that scan the public Twitter feed for specific stuff. The first looks for curse words and posts them to twittertale.com.

The second, and much more interesting, looks for mentions of candidates in tweets and posts them to politweets.com

Joelogon said...

Hadn't seen, I'll check em out.