today i was thinking about how twitter has pretty much rounded up my friends from about the last 2 decades of my life – people from secondary school, junior college, polytechnic, university, irc, work all into 1 common platform. and then there are the new acquaintances from twitter that may already know people from the previous categories. it’s doing what facebook and msn did – aggregating people from different parts of your life. but it’s doing something better.
in facebook and msn, they’re still very much direct links, e.g.: you communicate in a 1 on 1 environment, direct messaging. in twitter, when i “broadcast” a message, everyone receives it and reads it, but people start making connections with each other. so i have my poly friends talking to my irc friends and then to some new twitter acquaintances. new relationships are formed this way. ideas are cross pollenated. the world becomes an even smaller place.
i tried to map out some of my friends from the various periods of my life, who are all on twitter, and i included some secondary common acquaintances. somewhere in there, there are cross links. to avoid making this chart to messy, i just included a small portion of the huge list of people on my twitter account that i follow. will someone create a website to do a “6-degrees of separation” by tracing twitter links?
• product of the ‘80s • ad man in sgp • major tech junkie or technosexual • twitter addict • amateur petrolhead / photographer • best found on a beach after a couple of dry martinis¶