connecting*the*dots

Last year I quietly scoffed at Twitter because I couldn’t imagine how I would possibly keep in tune with my friends updates. Intra-day IM or SMS messages weren’t very sexy options (even Twitterific drives me bonkers to a certain degree), so I left Twitter on the sidelines.

Well, I’m glad to say that I’ve managed to figure out a system that works for me:

• I’ve set my Twitter settings to send direct messages — personal responses to my Tweets — straight to my cell, which so far has only amounted to two or three messages per week.
• I’ve signed up for the RSS feed of my friends page, so I now check it as often as the rest of my subscriptions in Google Reader; Tweets have literally become micro-posts from friends and I comment with direct messages via my cell
• Thanks to Alex King’s Twitter Tools plug-in (with John Ford tweaks), all my Tweets automatically become blog posts here, exposing my micro-posts to a different audience entirely.

I went from hating the thought of using Twitter, to loving the service.

For what it’s worth…

(shot by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)

So the world has woken up and discovered Twitter.

I’m not gonna front, I’ve only been Twittering for a few months now. I sat on the sidelines for the last year or so and watched Tara and Chris pimp it, but I just couldn’t figure out how it fit into my world.

Well, I think I’ve finally got it… and then some.

While a bunch of people out west have large numbers of close friends that use Twitter incessantly, I don’t. Most of my peeps from the NYC and Greensboro area don’t view communicative technology through quite the same lens as left coasters (we’re all a step or two behind on that front). So my friend list — while filled with people I consider to be friends — aren’t folk that I know extremely well or interact with on a daily basis.

So I’m now getting a chance to familiarize myself with colleagues from both across the country and the other side of the world.

That’s actually quite cool.

Sure, sometimes their Twitters are as dumb as mine, but that just gives me more insight into their varied personalities. Those Twitts about eating PB&J or screaming at a cabbie only confirms that we’re more alike than different. And when they do drop science and briefly enlighten the world as to what they’re working on, well, that’s the gold mine of Twitter.

Chris Messina stuck that nugget of a thought in my head the last time we hung out at Citizen Summit. He implored me to use Twitter and keep him (and anyone else following me) in the know with what I was doing with The People, Yes.

The conversation got even deeper once we all started discussing ways to bridge the digital divide locally, and before I knew it, I was thinking about Twitter implementation within the TPY interface.

So check this out:

That’s a John Ford special for you.

He took Alex King’s Twitter Tools beta plug-in, tweaked the partially functional plug-in code to post Twitters to my Wordpress blog with an appended category and styled the category with a CSS class.

So now every time I SMS to 40404, not only do I add to the stream of consciousness on Twitter, I’m documenting those fleeting thoughts straight to my blog.

The term “live blogging” just evolved big time overnight, as did “citizen journalism” (and if they’re smart, so will the “mainstream media“).

Now imagine how this could impact folk on the other side of the digital divide — people without moment to moment access to laptops or desktop computers, but armed to the teeth with cell phones.

Did I mention that John Ford is the man?