When I start talking to folks about Web 2.0 and mention Twitter, I get some curious reactions. Most often, it is I don’t get it.

The ‘technical’ description of Twitter is that it is a micro-blogging tool. You are given 140 characters to share your message, called a tweet. People follow your tweets and you are able to ‘follow’ the tweets of other people. Most of the time, when you follow someone they’ll follow you back except for celebrities or people who don’t get that’s what you’re supposed to do. For example, I follow M.C. Hammer, The Today Show, and a bunch of random people I don’t yet know. I follow them because they sound interesting, have knowledge I might want to tap, or seem like potential clients or partners.

The thing about Twitter is that once you get into it, it can suck you in. My first experience with that was during the Presidential Debates. You can put a hash-tag in your tweets which provides a filtering capability, sort of like a news feed.

Web 2.0 Lesson of the Day: Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. Different sites such as Tweetgrid.com or Hashtags.org allow you to find tweets by hashtags so you can see what’s a-buzz.

So during the debate, you could make comments about the debate and by adding #debate08 to your tweet they would show up on the feed. Watching the feed made it feel like you were in a huge room with people from totally different political views and affiliations making comments on what was going on. It was AMAZING.

A couple nights ago, I got sucked into Twitter, connecting with people I don’t (yet) know and some I do. It was multi-tasking at its best (and worst). There were inspirational quotes and links to interesting articles flying by. I got to listen in on and participate in banter about a variety of topics, including the occasional philosophical or religious debate. Interestingly enough, hours passed before I realized it.

Contrast that with the next night. I actually talked to a couple friends on the telephone. We discussed the health of aging parents, swapped the latest kid-story, and even got into some philosophical and religious discussions. It was great to connect at such a personal level, with people who know more than 140 characters-at-a-time worth of my life. I

t is such an interesting evolution that Web 2.0 has brought us around to. I’ve reconnected with 48 of my former high school classmates on Facebook and made a connection for a woman traveling alone to Bahrain via Twitter. I’ve also reconnected with my best friend from high school through his googling me and now talk with him frequently, showing that what starts as an internet connection or reconnection can evolve.

But at the end of the day, I wouldn’t trade my ‘real’ friends for people following me or befriending me electronically. There is a line of connection that has to eventually cross into the non-electronic realm for it to be truly meaningful. If I get sick or have a crisis in my family, no one in the Twittersphere may even know, but my friends would be right here, offering to take my kids or share a meal. Oh, on Twitter they might wonder where YourBoot (my twitter profile) had gone, but for no more than a nanosecond. Then it would be right back to retweeting, direct messaging, and trying to make some sense with only 140 characters.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 11:18 am and is filed under Business Growth, General, business success secrets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.