3 posts tagged “twitter”

It's been a long time since I've posted here.

I find that I often explore a new tool, crawl inside of it and make it home for awhile, then move on.  There's a lack of friction with so many of the social networking tools.  I don't want to date, toss a shout out to a new band, or increase my network.  I don't think anybody hanging out over the Twitter watercooler really gives a damn about what I just put in my coffee or fed my cats.  In first life I'm a public figure, so in my second one I find myself compelled to hide.  Running a successful business means being swallowed whole by IMs most days in Second Life, and the lack of any truly tangible privacy tools there makes it really damned tough to get a day's work done.

So, I became a bit of a hermit.  Okay, a lot of one.  And I liked it.  (And yes, I admit that it's a real hardship holing myself up with Baron frigging Grayson to build and play ... ~cough~)

I really have enjoyed reinventing myself as a recluse the past two years.  I'm a workaholic, and having a partner that shares the same insane work ethic and obsessions has made it all the easier still.  So much for the best laid plans ~grins~

Second Life has been a grand retreat, but the past few months I'm finding myself drawn into a very different kind of playground: one that doesn't exist in a single online community, but rather spanning a handful of mixed media tools and sites.  It started when Baron rekindled a love of seeing the world through old film cameras again.  He began posting notes and discoveries on his own blog here, and some rather cool, kindred spirits were gathering round.  Several were people we'd aleady connected with in Second Life as customers, and those connections were rarely more than a handful of brief encounters because of the tendency to cultivate a precious reclusiveness for the reasons I talked about above.  But I noticed something odd happening here.  In sharing a picture and some personal nugget, we were swapping stories.  It wasn't a transaction.  There was no obligation on either end.  It didn't demand lengthy, real time responses, dropping things in the middle of an inspired work session to reply.  No, this was more like slinking down into a favourite old chair in a beat-up pair of slippers with a big mugga joe in your hand, and quietly inviting familiar hearts in.

This began to spill over onto Flickr when we started posting pics there too.  Same faces.  Same fun, easy-going way of connecting.  People that I once thought of as customers I now think of as friends.  You see there's this odd little backyard fence, and it doesn't inhabit a space between just two yards, but bridges many, making them feel like the same kind of small, intimate shared space instead of some overwhelming digital geography.

omidyar.net, Second Life, Vox, Flickr, Twitter ... they all feel like rooms in the same house right now.  Where before I once dreaded the demands placed on my time by the human interaction, I now find myself craving it.  I watch Thaumata's video blog about her grandma Dorothy and am moved in ways I cannot describe.  I see this tender, vibrant person, and not just a name on a posting.  I watch Arteer romp through digital playgrounds and master them and make them so much fun.  I see her pictures on Flickr and her little notes and often end up laughing or connecting to some idea in some new way, and I love it.

It's sort of silly to just share these two women, just two names, but they are both such marvellous examples of the very thing that made me want to come back and post today:  a sense of kindred spirits with elbows on the kitchen table, and people I'd love to know in first life.  Zeke Poutine, Riversong Garden, Pam Omidyar and Callie Cline were people I connected with that way several years ago, and the ability to dive into Second Life together and culitvate our relationship in new ways was pretty damned incredible at times.  Okay, so I admit that having Zeke as a fairygodmother-in-garters (her words, not mine, but damn are they good!) with the same insane fetish for chocolate has less to do with social networking and more to do with Adventures with the Estrogen Army, but that's another post for another day, and my five minutes are up.

Would love to hear how others are thinking and feeling about connecting simultaneously through mixed media and networks.  Maybe you'd consider sharing some of your own favourite digital haunts with me here?

Robert Scoble pointed to an interesting blog that Andy Carvin posted about the potential for Twitter to save lives.  For those of you who aren't familiar with Twitter yet, it's a social networking tool that's sort of like the office water cooler and RSS headlines all rolled into one.  My buddy Kitto gave me a nudge on it about a month ago, and while I was scratching my head at the time (good lord, not another social networking nightmare) I've actually come to appreciate the less tangible advantages of recreating the backyard fence in the digital hood.

In his post, Andy is suggesting that Twitter just might be the thing to save lives, where cellphones and other messaging systems fail.  He points to Hurricane Katrina as an example, with cellular networks and similar systems downed.  Text messaging appeared to work inspite of the outages because it's a relatively low-bandwidth communication tool.

Rather than repeating the wisdom of his post, I'll just offer a link to it.  It's worth the grok ...

http://www.andycarvin.com/archives/2007/03/can_twitter_save_lives.html

He's a colleague of mine at omidyar.net, and always has some profound musings on the digital divide.

I -tried- to stop feeding the monster.  Social networking tools are the devil.  Everyone you know is there, talking about washing their car and making chicken pot pie, and yet, like a car wreck, I'm drawn to them.

My buddy Kitto keeps hauling me out on these little junkets.  Vox: I get it.  Twitter, I'm still scratching my head on, wondering simultaneously why anyone would want to know that I was 1) burning my Sunday pot roast at the same time as I was preparing my next radio show and updating the scripting in digital pirate sails and pianos while  2) trying to figure out how to post to it from Second Life even though I have the overwhelming desire to run screaming in the other direction.

The problem is this: where's the friction? .... and is it as simple as the fact that this is merely the proverbial backyard fence?  All my favourite buds are there, and unlike other social networks, Twitter isn't trying to dress itself up as anything it's not.  It appears to be just chatty stuff, like hanging around the water cooler, or on a Segway trying not to run over friends at a retreat ... and, this is compelling.  The biggest "aha!" moments have not come wrapped up in any formal brainstorming session so much as those little spontaneous neural firings that occur in casual conversations with friends.

So while I'm still not quite sure why I'm compelled to fall down this latest digital rabbit hole, I'm happy to follow the hunch that there may be some accidental moments of genius lurking in the halls.

~sideways glance at Kitto who knows I'm a geek with no self-control when it comes to the technical sugar rush of new toys~

Thanks, Kitto, I think ... ~grins~

(Anyone else feeling mildly schizophrenic when scratching the itch to register twice?  The real me ... the virtual me  ... the lines that are graying ...)