As social services spread, mutate, spawn like they are, I am sure I’m in the same boat as at least a few others– what was once novel and every peek drew attention, at what point do you draw the line? Do you automatically reciprocate any offered friendship?
I;m pretty much connected with a good circle via twitter (have not heard peep form jaiku in a while, is there a pulse?), but I get about 2-3 offers a day, mostly form folks I don’t know, and have to admit I ignore a lot I cannot recognize from their ID in the offered email. Sorry if I offended a real friend of colleague, but when I get once from “Jacques Ami” who has about 2000 friends, I am a bo doubtful he/she is seeking a meaningful relationship.
Just for fun, actually an un intended consequence, I have a small twitter Petri dish going. During some April prep for another presentation, I created a test account in twitter I never used. I call her my aunt who had just a few salty tweets here and there. And since, she has been pretty quietly. But strangely enough, every few weeks, she picks up a new friend. How? Why? It is some strange things mixing up in Aunty’s petri dish, though the experiment is now a put suspect by drawing attention to her.
My own tweeting has wavered a bit, not really keeping up with the heavy streamers of my fave colleagues, dashing in and out quickly- and updates have been mainly about barbecuing and my swimming pool battles with algae. Sounds like the inane stuff that gives twitter the rap that keeps its reputation in the “that’s tyhe dumbest thing I have ever heard of” range of the Twitter Adoption Cycle.
But, fellow tweeters, is there some sort of fear of “missing” something going on, like missing out on the latest rumors and topics in school? Or is that the wrong metaphor? It still has my attention, as I continue to pick up good nuggets of links and references here and there.
Ah well, just musings from my early morning here at the airport – http://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/119942252 — next up is a sociographic study of patterns of herding around the Southwest Airline “A” lines 😉
Hey Alan,
What’s funny is that twitter, is that when I heard about it, I thought, “that’s insane.” But the small chunks of info as well as personal posts there satiates my urge to better know those folks in my aggregator. For a person who doesn’t always open his aggretator, it is a nice place to see conversations such as there.
Cheers, – Alex
Last Friday I thought of having only the twitter window open while reading pages in web 0.0, I mean paper. Just to have some like-minded company while doing a somewhat boring task.
Twitter was not showing any updates for 2 hours. I thought, what if they all suddenly decided to get tired of tweets? Fortunately, someone else decided to voice the problem. You’re still there. Magic.
Blogs are definitely the node to network, to express yourself fully. Would we have met otherwise? But there is a need of proximity. In your words, Alan, “being there”.
So here we are at different stages of “meeting”:
1. Blog- When there is time to read and the topic is attractive or relevant to my learning stage. Reflection.
2. IM-skype – Same time. When there is some purpose (not just hi!). Action, collaboration.
3. F2F – When lucky enough. (When the plane ticket is affordable -alas! not from BA…When job or holidays allow for it… )
4. Twitter- Anyhow, any topic, anytime. And free.
Two thousand friends in twitter? Only tweeting interesting links? They did not get it. You subscribe to the person, not the blog.
Keep barking!
Claudia’s pretty much nailed it for me, too. Thanks, Claudia. And Alan, choose your channels and let fly: I’ll be listening. 🙂
I also thought Twitter to be a little insane in the beginning, but now I keep getting these nuggets of interesting links, resources, meeting some interesting people, reconnecting to others, being updated on my friends’ lives (well, at least, my virtual ones, for I guess the ones I meet f2f have no idea about this tool). There’s always something interesting out there, and it seems you’re never, ever alone. Funny, for example, with Claudia Ceraso. We’ve been bumping into each other for some time, but after Twitter we started connecting in a different way. I realized how much we have in common, been keeping track of her blogs, commenting there, getting her feedback…So, who said Twitter is not for good?
And yes, Alan, I get all kinds of pseudo-friends that want to join my network. What’s that all about? Do they want to show how popular they are? Do they want to have big numbers? In my case, I want to connect with someone that I’ll be learning with, old friends, new ones, but the connection needs to be meaningful, not just for the numbers. In my case, it’s about learning and sharing.
My musings this morning…
Carla