I’ve had numerous people ask me recently, “What is twittering?”. Well, put twitter is simply a short status like update. It works like an SMS message or an instant message. The ties to SMS reflect in its 140 character limit per tweet. Think small chunk of information, quickly digestible.
Most people don’t get it or understand the value. Honestly, sometimes it’s hard to think about the real value as well, but here’s three instances that have made me love it:
- In Austin at SXSW ’08 the b5media crew used twitter to let each other know where everyone was. We used it to schedule meetups (tweetups), lunches, dinners, rides back to the ranch, and to communicate about what seminars and sessions were interesting.
- If I’ve got a quick question about something, sometimes I’ll post it to twitter now instead of immediately going to Google and finding the answer. The difference here is that the answer I’ll be getting in return has now been filtered into a group of people (those I follow and follow me) that I trust for some reason and are probably involved in similar interests and activities as I am.
- The opportunity to be introduced and meet new people is also cool. I’ve yet to make it to an IndyTweetup, but one of these days I will.
With all of that being said, Cherie just shared with me an interesting article about a church that did a Twitter Church service:
So we started wondering, what would it be like to bring the Twitter kind of participation into Fusion in the same way we would think through any other worship interactive?something that gets people involved in what is happening?so Fusion isn?t happening ?to? them but rather ?with and because of and through? them.
After just working on the redesign of our own church website and thinking about ways to increase what we offer online through podcasts and blogs, the idea of reaching exponentially more people through our website and online experience than we do in our actually church buildings on Sundays is interesting.
Now, I’m coming farther away from the idea of church happening on Sundays and realizing that church needs to be happening every day in our lives and with everyone around us. Twitter isn’t going to replace real-live, in-the-flesh relationships. But it does provide us the opportunity to touch more lives than we actually can in the flesh as well.
What do you think?