I'm on twitter now too -- fashionably late according to Toby Dayton. Until recently, I thought twitter was just foolish but somehow in a very short matter of time, I have completely reversed my opinion. It took me a few years to start blogging and I generally prefer to arrive late to a technology party. So, I still consider it a bit early for twitter in spite of Toby. In fact, I am intrigued by my own reversal.
The most important reason, is perfectly articulated by Joel:
1. It’s about relationships. Success in life is largely about relationships. Success in business coincides. By following people on Twitter and other microblogging platforms like Facebook, I’ve gotten to know people at a much deeper level than if I was just to read someone’s blog or socialize at a conference. Short updates allow me to know a person’s favorite sports teams, restaurants, weekend activities, family adventures and the like. And by weaving together the pieces of someone’s life in this manner, I’m able to know them on a much deeper level. It’s actually quite rewarding on many humanistic levels.
Twitter solves another problem for me, and that is this: there are a handful of things I'm tempted to blog about every day. But I try to restrain myself, because the entrepreneurs I'm primarily writing for are so busy they are not blogging themselves. I know their time is precious and try to respect that by blogging only when my two cents might be unique in some way. So twitter provides a second channel for a different kind of information sharing or thinking -- and it allows me to get it on my blog without clogging up the RSS.
Speaking of relationships, I met a lot of people by e-mail between 1997 and 2000, and really enjoyed the Internet scene. In the beginning, I thought everyone that was on the Internet was cool. And everything was exciting and new. Then my company grew and I interacted with few people on the outside for a long time.
My networking was confined mostly to the NicheBoards.com group (and this group grew indirectly out of a chance encounter with another job board operator I met on a jury!). And then for about a year and a half, I had very little contact with anyone for health reasons. Now that I'm on the mend, I'm getting more involved in marketing again and the new tools (linkedin, ning, twitter, blogging software, etc.) are reviving my long dormant enthusiasm for networking.
Of course, the telephone still works too -- the other day I noticed a recruiting blogger talking about domains. So I e-mailed him to request a link. He wrote back to say that he was a fan of mine and knew that we owned this-and-that.coms and to suggest we talk by phone. It turned out that, not only did we share an interest in recruiting domains, but we both attended the MIBS program at USC, he in the Portuguese track and I in the Spanish track.
I hope that next year, I will be attending industry events again after sitting on the sidelines for quite a few years-- but for now, at least I'm in the virtual game.
