The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
In the fall of 2007, I suddenly had a lot of requests show up in my e-mail inbox for a new online service called Twitter. It was being promoted as micro Ð blogging, a service that was simple and easy to use that you could only type 140 characters into. Checking it out, I found a simple page with a box that you could type in and which asked one question: ÒWhat are you doing?Ó I wasnÕt impressed and I wasnÕt convinced. But several months later, after having supper with a friend in Winnipeg who raved about the service, I took the five minutes to set up a free account. Knowing a lot of people online, I began to search them out on Twitter, finding people to follow and soon others I knew were following me. Soon the screen began to roll by as more people signed up to the site. I knew I was on to something when several conferences that I really wanted to attend but couldnÕt had their sessions tweeted by people sitting in the audience. I had the sense of being there. While I wasnÕt actually in the room with them, the instant updates gave me the important information I needed. I was hooked. At some point, Twitter becomes like background music to your life. A constant stream of requests from people looking for information, telling you what they are up to and putting out new things online. It is like having a personal network and research team from around the world on call whenever you need them. While I follow almost 250 people, I have almost 425 who follow me. This means that whenever I am looking for a piece of information for something I am doing in my classroom at school, whenever I need a computer tip or help figuring something out, I can post it on Twitter and within minutes have several hundred people trying to solve my problem for me. Twitter doesnÕt make sense at all without being involved with at least a few dozen people. Groups of friends giving updates on what they are up to that day. Networks of people have formed in almost every profession, swapping information and tips. Friends just staying in touch. There are countless reasons why a service like this makes sense. In my network there are many people who do a lot of traveling. ItÕs become common place for people to post when they are leaving some place and an approximate time when they expect to be back online. Phone numbers have been exchanged and if people donÕt show up when they are supposed to, the phone starts ringing. The ultimate example came early in the school year when a principal in Philadelphia asked for help identifying some pictures that had been found on the cell phone of a teenager who had run away from home. It turned out the pictures were taken in downtown Calgary. This principal then tweeted, looking for help with other clues that had turned up and this boy was located within 24 hours and returned home. This is a simple but very powerful example of a network in action. In many ways, Twitter is similar to something like Linux or Wikipedia. No one gets paid and everyone simply pitches in where they can. I can sit here in Snow Lake and yet know that a friend of mine in South Carolina is getting ready for a presentation, while another has been delayed at Heathrow airport because of fog. I know that a teacher in Shanghai has finished reading the book I recommended to him while another is making plans for us to meet on a swing I am making through Boston in July. Twitter isnÕt perfect. Like many exploding sites, it sometimes strains under the millions of hits it gets each minute and sometimes fails to load. But it is far better than it was even a few months ago, with most downtime planned and posted in advance. A service like this gives us a glimpse of a globally-connected world in our own backyard. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
