Beyond Twitter Apr 10, 08:48 AM
If twitter goes down and there’s no one to twitter it does the space-time continuum collapse upon itself in an infinite pretzel?
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how I use twitter, how others use twitter and say I should use twitter and how twitter has helped me grow knowledge and my business. I use it as a chat room, a 24/7 networking event, a bookmarking organizer and another tool in my procrastination arsenal. Until recently, I was freelancing as a woman of all trades, but the confidence and support I found from the little @ symbols in my feeds really pushed me to go forth and just do it. (You’ll hear about “it” later, so stay tuned!)
I used to worry the recent flood of twitter adopters trying to get several followers in one fell swoop were missing the point. Twitter doesn’t work effectively if you’ve got hundreds or thousands of followers and no way to leverage them. Because, when twitter shuts down, if you’ve based your entire social network on twitter, you’ve got nothing. Have you ever lost your cellphone or forgot to pay the bill or in some other way been without a communications tool? That’s the feeling I’m talking about.
When twitter slows down and the failwhale appears, feeds take up to 30 minutes to update, or the system shuts down altogether, I find myself without what has become a critical communication tool. I am cutoff from a lot of people with no other way to get in touch with them. Unless I’ve created a tangible connection with them elsewhere – in person, on the web or via email – they actually disappear from existence for those couple of seconds, minutes or hours when twitter is unavailable.
Tweetups exist to bridge the virtual gap between friends and followers. I’ve only been to one myself but that relationship I still maintain to this day. But, I know I can email him or even text him on the same casual level I communicated with him on twitter. I have similar relationships with several of the people in my feed.
What are other ways that relationships can persist beyond twitter?
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