Explaining Twittter "It's like passing notes in class". Re-discovering Twitter
event exclusively on Twitter. You can follow all my genius insight
here twitter.com/courtines This was the first time in a long while I
was active on twitter. Oh sure I check my news and I post on occasion
but this was my fourth re-introduction. Oh? What were the other
three? I'll tell you - 2006 was the first, it was the wild west
then no one knew what the hell was going on. There was
experimentation there was no retweet and this was WAAAY before Oprah,
Kutcher and CNN. It was exciting and while I didn't really know what
we were on to, I knew it was fundamentally important. I yelled from
the top of the mountain and not many people heard me (Not at AOL at
least) I had a joy....However over time, with the battle to help
people understand it's relevancy exhausted me. The SECOND twitter phase was my first covering of a conference on
Twitter. I am not sure when it was? I think it was 2007. Anyway,
being in sessions and being able to convey what was going on to the
people outside the conference was a wonder. Unfortunately, I was
hindered by the fact that I had shitty tech. I didn't buy in to the
iPhone crazy and had a crap-tacular HTC Mogul. Let me tell you folks,
Windows Mobile SUCKED! And they deserve the predicament they are in
today. I couldn't kick ass as much as I liked. The third phase was the desktop app phase. First Tweetdeck then
Seesmic and back and forth between them. They both helped fill in the
gaps between the Twitter ecosystem. Following trends in real time,
seeing conversation happen while scrolling down the screen. It really
was a wonder. having two monitors was a MUST and I swear I felt like
I was on Star Trek. Sadly work got in the way. My duties as just a
community man were not enough to justify fiddling away the day talking
online. I knew (and AOL told me by its layoff actions) that just
doing one thing wasn't enough. So I got my selves dirty doing more
and more web production and content acquisition for our games site.
Sadly, playing flash games for testing purposes and running the
resource hogging AIR based Twitter platforms made for Crashy
McCrasherson desktops. Someone had to go, and sadly twitter took a
back seat. This recent phase (the fourth if you are counting) has been fueled by
two things - a better phone (Droid) - and Twitter's maturity. At the
conference this time, the tweets were plentiful. We had hashtags
going (yes we had them in the past but go with me on this) There were
people in the room that I knew. We had wonderful back channel going.
We made fun of the presenters. It led to meet ups, dinners and all
sorts of things. When I got home, I was trying to explain to my wife
the whole thing. She's a twitter novice, aware of it, but not a
user. She came up with the BEST EXPLAINATION EVER! She said "So it's
like passing notes in Class?" It was a eureka moment. Using twitter
at live events or while watching TV or Sporting events is like passing
notes in class. Except in twitters case, you are passing notes with
millions of people at a time.
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