I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately, especially after several discussions with people around the topic at SxSW. It’s a subject of particular interest to be because I find it easy to verbalize but hard to convey digitally, especially within one’s attention span. As Amy Hoy recently said … “Brevity is the soul of twit.”

When I first came out to San Francisco to visit Jesse, a long time friend, I hadn’t planned on taking a job. In fact, my plan was to move from Lexington to South America. It would take a great bit to divert me from my chosen path, and to my surprise, diverted I was.

For a long time I’ve found great value in ‘the little things.’ Smiling at someone on the street, having a small conversation at the line at the market, dot, dot, dot. These are the things from which we build our character, our selves. We take the little things we see in each other that touch a particular emotion and absorb them into our own personas. I saw this potential within Twitter, except on an immensely greater scale. Of note, at the time I wasn’t ‘into’ social networks. The only one I even belonged to was Flickr. I had no MySpace or Facebook, but this little thing called Twitter somehow stuck me as different. A small chord that played and whispered: I do not replicate or improve on what has already been. I am revolution.

Revolution (n): a drastic and far-reaching change in ways of thinking and behaving.

I’ve now been working on Twitter for the better part of a year and a half. Interestingly, it’s become a posterchild for the discussion of scaling social internet architecture, yet what I have found equally as interesting is the social implications that have emerged. Something unexpected. Something new. Twitter changes the way I interact with people on some fundamental level! I have friends that both are, and are not on Twitter. The ways in which I communicate with them are actually beginning to differ. I should note that this is not negative, but there is a divergence. Twitter provides so much context into people’s lives. I know things that people are doing and thinking that I wouldn’t otherwise, either because they were too small to bring up in conversation, or weren’t appropriate to bring up in a later encounter based on time passed. Plus, we have way to many little things happening in our lives to discuss them all with others.

Enter Twitter. I find myself framing conversations based on microcontext { not to be confused with microbloging, which is a word I loathe }. These bits of personal information, these Twitters. Suddenly I find I have much more personal context around a conversation that might otherwise diverge to one of those “So, how are things?” interactions. This is a drastic and fundamental change in the way in which we communicate. All the little things! The smiles. The laughs. The tears. Walking the dog. Feeding your cat. Eating a banana. Having a baby. These are what Twitter are to me.