Corvida - May 2, 2008
I can definitely sympathize. Even though I’m in the US, the city that I stay in is pretty non-technological, let alone social. Getting people to use social networks is a tough thing. Even though they have their benefits, it’s not for everyone and everyone isn’t particularly fascinated with the web in the same way that we are unfortunately.
As a student it was not unusual for me to spend no more than six hours a day at home. The rest of the time I was out socialising, whether helping post grads with their work or with those from my studies. As a result of this I started to pay attention to many of the social networks. It had shifted from Facebook where all my real life friends could be found to more abstract social networks such as twitter, jaiku and others.
Of course I’m the most active twitter user in Geneva, as if that was going to be a surprise to anyone. Before that I was London’s most active twitter user with over 5000 posts in a month back in December.
Mcwflint - Feb 6, 2008
And from Twitter, you discover their blogs or the blogs they are reading, the videos they watch, the things they are thinking about which only leads to more people and more Twitters. I like how Twitter has shrunk the world for me so that my neighborhood isn’t just a geographical region of Flint Michigan in the United States. It includes people from Chicago and San Francisco, from London and Paris and .
For you to understand what people are talking about on twitter there is one thing you should know. When you follow Dacort, Loudmouthman, loic Lemeur, Jeff Pulver or many other people including me you’ve got to follow those that they are talking to as well as those that are listening. By this I mean that twitter is not about individuals so much as community. If I spend the morning speaking to the English community then there are many names that will appear again and again.
There is such a large contrast between life in London and the village where I grew up in Switzerland. In one place you can walk for kilometers before getting to the shops whilst in the other going down the street is enough. In one place there is a 24hr a day life going on outside your window and in the other you hear children playing and you hear the birds tweeting whilst water flows in a river next door.