Alpha Mind Blog

You’re about a day late, Jeremiah. I already succumbed to Twitter, after months of resistance, just yesterday.

Two things drove me to it.

1. Scoble’s post about Twitter and last Tuesday’s earthquake. (I might not have noticed his post except that I’d been one of the people at the table with him when the quake happened.) I realized: he’s right, Twitter isn’t a toy, and I need to check it out.
2. Your micromedia meetup on Thursday.

About the latter:

I thought it was pretty much a bust. But it offered much food for thought.

First off, I noticed in your summary of responses, you didn’t include the two that implicitly critiqued the meetup itself: mine and that of John Bradford.

Both of us pointed out that one of the beauties of communications technologies we already have is that they’re asynchronous (or at least can be.) And by the bye, Godin blogged on the same topic yesterday.

The meetup was the worst of both worlds.

On the one hand: By naming a time, you tossed aside the asynchronous aspect of online communications. (I know my contribution was a little bit whiny, but my point was valid: I’ll have to do a lot of work to get the people who “met up” on Thursday to view my video because it was late for the event.)

On the other hand: There was no real meetup. That is, those of us who showed up didn’t interact with each other at all. I know who contributed, but I had no way of knowing who was viewing/reading/hearing the contributions, or what they were thinking about them.

Which brings me to Twitter. Although there’s a comment facility on the wiki you used for the meetup, I think Twitter would have been a better way to make it a real meetup.

Consider the following somewhat different meetup rules:

• Plan your contributions ahead of time and contribute any kind of micromedia except Twitter. (that way we’ll be able to distinguish between the planned contributions and the on-the-fly reactions. Twitter is reserved for the reactions.)
• Set up a Twitter account for the meetup itself. Publish its URI. People who want to join the meetup will need to have Twitter accounts (& as you say they’re incredibly easy to set up.)
• People will be able to see who’s following the meetup’s Twitter account, and can also follow each other for the duration of the event.
• We can then actually meet, view and appreciate the contributions people had prepared ahead of time, and discuss them in real time.
• The meetup’s Twitter account persists, and the record is kept of the meetup. Whether it actually continues or not depends on the people who showed up and whether they want it to persist.

I hope this didn’t feel like a slam on you or your meetup. I thought the event was a great idea, and the frustrations involved in it were minor compared to the education I got.

So, my thoughts about all of this led me to set up a Twitter account yesterday.

It also led me to check out DISQUS and Intense Debate, which I’ve been blogging about. They’re both partial solutions to the problem that asynchronous communcation tends to lack continuity.

Happy Sunday, Jeremiah!

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 4th, 2007 at 12:43 pm and is filed under Life Itself. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Comments Feed . Both comments and pings are currently closed.