Tag: ambient intimacy

The beauty of Twitter

Here’s one of those great articles I wish I had written. From @jontangerine… (HT to @stealingsand)

I like Twitter because…

It reminds me is that human beings are still tribal. As an example, if you check your own address book, or think about your family and friends, they probably number no more than two hundred people. We may have more in the book, but it’s rare for our intimates to be greater than two hundred people. Our networks are geographically dispersed these days. Even if your network is mostly in one location, people are so busy living that it can be difficult to stay in touch. Twitter is a facsimile of living and working in proximity for me, and provides something unique, too

Jon touches on a few things he’d like to see on twitter. I’d ditto those as well and add that I’d like to see easy ways to track physical locations as well. There are other social networks that will track your location. BrightKite will even alert you when other users or friends are in your area. A very cool feature indeed. But there’s not a good BrightKite app for Blackberry yet, so that’s a bit of a bummer for me and will probably keep me from switching anytime soon.

I also find this line from Jon’s article interesting, “but it’s rare for our intimates to be greater than two hundred people.”

I think that’s true in so many arenas of life. I only follow 66 people on twitter (and leave the SMS/txt message updates off for all but maybe 5 people) and while I have over 300 “friends” on facebook I really only keep up with/track half of them (if that). But of course it is nice when something catches my eye from those other 150ers and I can get updates on them as well.

I also see the 200 people limit playing out in churches/workplaces and more. It’s really hard to get to know more than 200 people or so in any regular setting. Even if there are 15,000 people in a room, do you really know more than 200 of them? Can you know more than 200 and build real relationships with them?

I think that’s what I love about online communities like Twitter. I know 10xs more about folks like @Jess_Hays and @sgalloway since they joined Twitter than I ever learned about them just seeing them for a couple hours on Sunday morning. The same goes for folks who constantly fill out surveys on Myspace. I learned tons of things about folks in my tribe thanks to them taking some time to be intentionally open.

What about you? What makes Twitter beautiful for you? Do you agree that it’s rare to have intimate relationships with more than 200 people? Do you think that number is much higher or less?

web 2.0 rant

[rant]

So I love this idea of ambient intimacy. I love that I can get to know the folks in my community better and better through things like twitter, and facebook status updates and even their blogs.

I love that I can learn so much about people in short 140-character thoughts and quotes and comments throughout the day.

But I’m also getting annoyed that twitter is starting to become a “link dump” and/or a “read my new blog post!” @tonyjones twittered about this last week and I originally thought, well that’s a bit unkind – then I realized how many text messages (aka noise) I get throughout the day that are nothing more than “read my new blog post!”

I hate it because while I don’t mind seeing these things in facebook’s news feed or on my twitter friend feed I also see them in my RSS reader. So having an announcement about them show up on my cellphone as text messages really bugs me.

I know, I know – everyone just wants to plug their stuff — and honestly I’ve plugged a blog post here or there too. But I guess what gets me about the whole scenario is that for those folks I chose to go the extra mile in getting to know and actually opt-in to get their tweets sent to my cellphone (rather than just following them via the web). I don’t need a reminder to check your blog. And the fact that you automatically send me announcements every time you update your blog (rather than just highlighting the really good stuff) — or send a mass of tweets 3 or 4 times a day that share all your blog posts from the last several hours — makes me that less interested in following you or subscribing to your twitter feed. All the automatic posts just add to the noise and turn me off.

Am I making any sense? Maybe not — but I guess that’s why it’s a rant.

In full disclosure, the encounter blog and website are setup to automatically post a tweet anytime and every time a new blog post is updated and/or we post a new announcement or podcast to the website. So you can probably rant and rave about that and argue that I’m being biased (maybe this is where my rant/argument falls apart). However, I would argue in response that both the blog and the website are updated on a fairly limited basis and I’m/you’re not following the encounter twitter feed because you want to get to know someone better – it’s setup as a “news/announcement/prayer feed” for folks interested in encounter.

So there you have it. What say you?

[/rant]

I better post a link to this via twitter to be sure everyone knows about it and responds. 🙂

[rant continued]

update :: I also hate reading RSS feeds that don’t show the entire blog post. I don’t want to have to click “read more” or “this post continues elsewhere.” Just put the entire blog post in your RSS feed — PLEASE! I’m dumping a lot of RSS feeds right now that make me click on another link to read — it makes the entire point of RSS rather pointless.

[/rant]