Converge

I’m closing in on a year of using Twitter, seven months with Jaiku… and I’ve enjoyed the element of presence these applications afford - the vicarious enjoyment I get from the snapshots into the lives of my friends, many of whom live across the country.

I talk to some of these people regularly on the phone or by email and these are great ways to stay connected when I can’t see them in person, but Twitter has allowed me to enjoy a small percentage of their daily mundanities - the little things I used to find out from these friends because I saw them face-to-face all the time; now that we’re apart, these are the things that get edited out of the more formalized phone conversations or emails - stuff that’s too small to care about, but when it comes from people you care about, fills in the spaces of their lives in a way that’s enjoyable and comforting. It’s connective tissue.
This ambient intimacy is the original reason for Twitter: what are you doing right now? Up until recently, it was my primary use for it.

But if you follow these things, you know that by March of this year, Twitter was not only growing rapidly, but it was evolving in a number of ways, driven by users themselves. A couple are notable. First, people started choosing to bypass the direct messaging capability of Twitter, and began addressing friends publicly: @toddmundt… This conversation, the equivalent of shouting across a bar to a friend, is like IM but, at least for me, breaks out of the prison of the instant message paradigm: you should be online now, you should be interrupted by the message instantly, you should respond nearly instantaneously. I’ve used IM for about 12 years, but I’m far more pleased with Twitter’s capabilities in this regard, and the way I can control interruptions compared with IM.

The second evolution came very quickly, too, and this is where I’ve found Twitter and Jaiku to be the most valuable: the information sharing that’s taking place. I find out about some news stories on Twitter before they reach the front pages of CNN.com and the New York Times. More importantly, as the conversation grows and I add more diverse, interesting and thoughtful people to my network, I’m finding out about trends earlier, and discovering new ideas - like this Twitter note from American Public Media’s Jon Gordon that arrived a couple minutes ago:

Listener-conducted interviews? Post raw interviews for listeners to edit?

So here’s the deal: do you work in public radio? Do you work in public TV? Do you work at a joint licensee? Are you a consultant to these industries?

• Do you use Twitter? Add me.
• Do you use Jaiku? Add me.
• By all means, add John Barth, Tim Eby, and as many of the other public radio and TV folks you care to add.

NOT because I’m so smart and have so much to offer. Add me because you’re smart and you have good ideas and I want to know what you’re talking about. It will make me smarter, and perhaps as more of us in this industry chatter about stuff outside of occasional meetings and conferences, we’ll share ideas more efficiently and move more quickly.

That’s something we’re not known for, if you haven’t noticed.