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Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, et al

I went to the Naace Conference in Torquay again this year. You may wonder what that has to do with social networking but read on.

Jim Knight, the Minister for Schools and Learners opened the conference, not in video but in Second Life! It had a few technical issues, as every leading edge technology does, but the fact that a minister appeared in avatar form and showed us some work going on in Second Life was stunning and very brave. Not Social Networking in the conventional sense but fascinating.

Ewan McIntosh from Scotland spoke next and was very good. I think he was the first person to mention Twitter, but not the last. Having bought myself an iPhone I looked up Twitter there and then - and joined it during his talk! He also said that he likes to participate during conference sessions and often blogs about the speaker while they are actually speaking. This had a vibrancy that sounded exciting so I sent him an email while he was speaking to tell him as much. Never done that before. It may sound a bit twee but like all things, that first little step is always something easy. The important thing is that the smart phone in my hand had opened up an immediate communication that had previously been restricted to my computer. Even a laptop doesn't have that same immediacy.

The next day we had David Warlick from America. He reminded me of Alan November - like Alan he was inspirational. He referred to Twitter as well so I started following him. This is what you do in Twitter; you find interesting people and then "follow" them. Whenever they post a message (which has to be under 144 characters) you receive it in Twitter.

Since then I’ve been following both on Twitter and have added another 47 people. More surprisingly is that I seem to have gathered 86 people who are following me! I'll come back to Twitter in a moment.

Social Networking is usually thought of as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. When you join and establish a few friends you find yourself reading “Fiona is doing this” . . . “Alexander has taken a quiz” . . . and you think "yes but so what?" I've joined all three networks but they haven't inspired me much at all. I put it down to getting old.

But on the last day of the conference in his keynote, Steven Heppel went to Facebook and said “There are my friends, all busy doing things” and I realised that all the comments in Facebook aren’t so much irrelevant chatter as a window on people getting on with their lives – and you can be in touch in a sort of on-going way that simply wasn’t possible before.

Which brings me back to Twitter. It turns out to be quite fascinating. To begin with you can't see the point – people say what they are doing and you think . . . "der yes . . . but so what?" But it turns out to be so much more than that. Firstly, it fills in the background chatter of people's lives and this video on YouTube explains why that matters: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o (opens in new window)

What happens in Twitter is that the people you're following post their thoughts, ask questions, and give links to resources they've found. I've been directed to several excellent websites that I probably wouldn't have discovered otherwise. In fact I'd say I've learned an amazing amount since I joined Twitter.

Another excellent consequence is that Twitter has brought me closer to the world of politics - in a good way. When "10 Downing Street" posts a link to the Prime Minister when he's giving a speech, you can instantly watch or read the speech "from the horse's mouth" as it were. You no longer have to wait waiting for the BBC to find a biased soundbite to broadcast on the news. This is democracy in action.

Here's one final example. The week after the conference David Warlick was at another conference, this time in his home country, America. One day he posted a comment during a session he was attending to say that four people in the audience were pointing cameras at the speaker and streaming the talk to “Ustream”.

So I followed a link and found myself watching the speaker – sound and vision – from the angle of a seat in the audience. I was actually there, live, at a conference in America , listening to the speaker and watching her, as I sat at my computer in Stamford!

Where is the technology going to go next?

Talk about a global community. It’s alive and we’re part of it – and we’re no longer passive recipients, we’re actively contributing to it.