Coming Full Circle on Twitter

In the past when I wrote about Twitter, it was often as an East Coaster who was surrounded by other East Coasters. I hate to write it, but there is a fundamental difference between the cultures of the different coastal populations. To date, most of my East Coast friends have yet to embrace Twitter in any substantive way. It has been fully embraced by the media as a broadcast tool but the personal adoption of Twitter continues to lag. However, when I moved to the Bay Area last year I met a lot more people who had embraced Twitter. And just as Metcalfe’s Law states, the value of the Twitter network increased as I added new, active nodes. Twitter has become a lot more interesting when people I see on a regular basis are on-board and interacting with me. The nature of conversations around me has also shifted – it is no longer rare for me to discuss social media, tech news, and the future of technology. Again, the West Coast has proven to be a very different type of place.

I’ve recently started to conceptualize mobile games and applications as a form of distraction, one that is enabled by the combination of smartphones and reliable mobile access to the web. Ever since I picked up the iPhone, I have used it in the expected manner – playing games, reading email, and getting directions. I have also become accustomed to consuming a vast amount of news while I’m in between places. Rather than use RSS feeds, which is how I catch up on things when I’m using my laptop, I tend to do this through Twitter when I’m out and about. As soon as I run out of tweets to read, I often find myself updating to get the latest tweets – and because of how usage of the service has picked up, I’m often rewarded with a handful of new tweets to read. And whenever I post a tweet, I’ll often check periodically to see if I’ve provoked a response. The constant reward of fresh tweets and interactions is a powerful combination, and it has turned me into a bit of a Twitter junkie. It took a while for this pattern to emerge and its not always compelling, but during the week I can usually trust Twitter to deliver what I’m looking for.

Meaningful Connections Via Twitter…

I know precisely where I was when the news of Steve Jobs’ death broke. I was in the Haas library on Twitter, getting ready for a dinner I had later that night. At first I didn’t believe the news, but within a couple of minutes I was able to verify it as fact. I also know where I was when the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death broke – again, I was on Twitter. The value of Twitter as a news channel has increased steadily as my usage of it has increased and also as the media embraced it whole-heartedly. I can now think of meaningful moments that involved Twitter, and its hard for me to imagine a routine where Twitter wasn’t a part of my routine. These moments have involved the gamut of human experience, including notes of serendipity, sadness, excitement, surprise, and reflection.

Through the Berkeley Digital Media and Entertainment Club, I was given the opportunity to visit Twitter HQ and hear from Haas alumni that worked at Twitter. As they described the global scale and impact of the service alongside their personal experiences as Twitter employees, it struck me how I my own experience with Twitter had changed over time. I realized just how much I depended on Twitter as part of my routine. I had to face the reality that this service that annoyed the hell out of me back in 2009 was now a vibrant ecosystem that I used to check the pulse on sports, entertainment, and technology. While I don’t think I’m part of the majority on this one, Twitter is no longer a niche social network for self-promoters and early adopters.

Note: If you want to see my previous posts on Twitter, just use the Tag Cloud to the right.