I was hanging out with Tom Mandel yesterday - we had been introduced via Twitter by Dina. Our topic Twitter!
Intuitively we both feel that something important is going on. Twitter is deepening and extending a process of relationship development that transcends both time and place. We thought that Twitter is helping us to return to a more human life.
This began with the blogosphere.
Both of us had experienced a new reality of how blogging can connect people across time and space. In my case a new realm of friendship and work has emerged as a result of the process of friendship driven by experiencing another's blog for a while. This has been a process of reverse friend building - we start with the inner person and their thoughts and feelings and if we are lucky then meet each other and experience the external package last. In the physical world we start with the packaging and often never get any deeper than the surface.
The result is that high levels of trust are possible. I think I know many of my blogging friends better than my traditional friends. This trust has been put to the test and found to be reliable.
For me, these new friendships have become central to my life - it's like being an undergraduate again where I hang out all the time with my friends where we solve the problems of the world and share our lives.
A new work experience has been an important product. I get most of my work from this world and the work I enjoy the most is work that I share with these friends. My work and my heart have been brought back together.
So what about Twitter?
Blogging is hard work. Writing good material is hard labour and many of us burn out over time. Reading good material is hard work. If I have missed my daily dose of Reader for more than 3 days - I am overwhelmed and often just bin everything.
Twitter is light. James Governor hit the nail on the head today when he said that :
Twitter is like walking to school with your friends and hanging out, while reading blogs is reading their homework.
Twitter takes very little effort to help you get connected. Why? I think because on the surface it does not demand much of either the writer or the reader. It's not Homework - it is Hanging Out.
Being lighter it allows more social space.
For instance Luis Suarez - has just entered my life as has Tom Mandel via Twitter. I thought that my "Dance card" was full. I kept having to prune my Reader list of bloggers - I just could not cope with more - but with Twitter I can. It is socially much less expensive.
Tom and I live in small rural communities. We both work alone and at home. As we talked on Skype, he had his feet up on the desk and had his dog for company. My dogs were downstairs. We were alone.
But with Twitter, we are not alone. The new reality of work is that many of us work at home. But we are humans and hence primates. I don't miss the office but I do miss the social aspects of work. Twitter provides that - especially if you use Twitteroo or Twitterific. I find it comforting to see my friends pop up with what they had for dinner or what music they are listening too. I like being able to ask a quick question and get a reply. Sorry Dina we failed your request for help on your laptop lid.
I am finding that my relationships that had been close with blogging are becoming closer very quickly with twitter.
The pane that Twitterific offers is key to me and is perhaps an aspect of this new step that will be used widely in social software. It is a window to my network - "Eyes on the Street"
Twitter builds on blogging and helps connect us again. Connects us in that most important domain of the shared human experience - the mundane.
One of the saddest jokes about modern parenting is the idea of "Quality Time" relationships are nourished nit by the annual trip to Disney but by the everyday sharing of life's little moments. Quality comes from quantity and it is the little things that in the end are the big ones. It's the accumulation of the many threads that makes up the cloth that is a shared life.
So Twitter enables us to share at very low cost the mundane details of our lives and in so doing brings even deeper levels of trust and satisfaction.
So this little app is going to be huuuuge!
