Twitter at its best

“It’s like, only the regular people still Tweet on the weekend.” @PaulJManoogian

Quick take on twitter this weekend. I must say it was odd watching the action during the Twitter outage. My take on it was that it was mostly the users who have a high number of followers that were not being seen. The folks that I follow with under roughly 250 followers I was able to still see fine. The Scobles, Arringtons, LaPortes, Winers, Pirillos, Calacanissses??, even Tom Merritt, silent. Unless you found some temporary work around like unfollowing then refollowing various folks you could get little spurts of posts. Most of those, of course, were in the vein of “can you see this,” or “Twitter still down?”

This did start little mini-discourses, with those that I could still see, about how those folks are using Twitter. Seems that most of them use it to drive traffic to their respective web-sites and blog postings, some actually have something to say, a few let us know what boring conference is on hand today, yet others clue you in what wine(s) went with dinner, and still some just say “look at me!” I’m sure if you’ve spent any time with Twitter, who is who here, is clear. The great thing is that this is all O.K.; there is something to be gleamed from all of this.

I’ve kept my follow list relatively short right now, while I still get used to the flow. I’ve tried to get followers from every continent, (still looking for a genuine Antarctica tweeter) as many various counties, and regions as possible, and a good cross-section of backgrounds. I follow the A-listers down to just completely random folks that probably wonder why I showed up. What emerges is a Kundalini effect with information and memes traveling up and down the Twitter chakras. The important thing is that it can start at any point, and travels both up and down then back again in a ripple effect.

The best example I’ve seen of this recently was the Midwest earthquake that occured late last week. I had just happened to have sat down at the computer when it hit. It was mild enough here in Northern Indiana to question if it was indeed an earthquake, that I tweeted it to see if anyone else felt it. Within minutes I saw the information flying around before the USGS had it posted, and well before any news outlet was reporting it. It then expanded from a “did you feel it,” to others calling on people in the region to check on them, and then reporting back, and then people posting links to which news outlets were covering it.

I believe this is Twitter at its best, when something is actually going on. Imagine what twitter will look like the nights of the Democratic and Republican conventions, during the presidential elections, during the next G8 summit (or similar) protests, during the next Katrina, or even the next WTC.

Its during these down, or if you want to call it slow, times that it is best for you to start deciding who gives you substance in their tweets, not just promotion (and yes, you can effectively do both.) This is so when the real need for good information comes up, you don’t fall into being duped with misinformation by those just trying to echo what “they” said. This is a great time to assess who is giving you original thoughts and meaningful links. Wine tips are great, but sometimes I like to just sit down to a good plate of meat.