I love twitter, and that's no secret.
Apparently, I'm one of the ones who "gets it" and I enjoy it immensely. I love the community, I love the accessibility to entities that otherwise I'd have no way into (@CarlyWithAXE has made me a loyal Axe Man for life. They get me AND my hair!), and most of all, I love the tweets. I love the endless stream of consciousness that, collectively, my follow list gives me. I can tap into that stream anytime I want and instantly I can take the pulse of my twitterverse. And let's not forget that. It's MY twitterverse. I made it up by selecting all the cool people I follow. My twitterverse is not your twitterverse. Our personal pulses beat a little differently. So when we take them, we're going to be colored by the endless paints of the little universe we created, and our pulses will be different. Every time.
That's the beauty of Twitter. Relevancy. It's my Twitter feed and I get to decide how it feels and how the collective stream of tweets defines me.
That's why I follow you. Because you're interesting. Not because of your work. I read your blog, and I know the work you do. I know that if I have a question about Flex, or Actionscript, or ColdFusion, you're probably a terrific resource.
But I don't give a shit about that. I care about you.
Matt Kerner and Leif Wells are two of the most proficient and intelligent people I know. Same with Ed Sullivan, Todd Sanders, Scott Fegette and Raymond Camden. They all represent the best and brightest of my professional peer group, in my opinion.
But that's not why I follow them.
I follow Matt and Leif because besides being terrific developers, they're interesting. Their lives are interesting, and it's really nice to see how their lives, and the way they go about their day shapes how they develop and how they do what they do. Same with Raymond Camden. There's no doubt that these are some of the best developers out there, but when I wanna read about development, I'll go to Raymond's terrific blog. When I wanna get insight into how his mind works, and how he approaches problems, I'll actually pay attention to his twitter stream. Which do you think is more valuable in the long term?
I think everyone I follow is tremendously interesting and I wouldn't follow them if I didn't think they had something to contribute. Their contributions, however, don't always come in the form of tangible nuggets of actionable information. They come from the slowly evolving picture of who they are, and why I like them.
Conversely, I try to use my Twitter stream as simply a window into my head. Nothing more. I have no lofty goals, I'm not looking for a million followers. Honestly, if I didn't have a single follower, I'd still tweet endlessly. Why? Because I think there's value in just putting your thoughts down. If you don't put your thoughts down on paper, or commit to at least acknowledging them in some way, what use are they? How many opportunities did you miss because you let some thought get away from you without at least recognizing it and jotting it down?
If you consider that everyone else that I follow is doing the same thing, you suddenly get a sense of how relevant and valuable MY Twitterverse is.
And that's why I follow you. Because you're interesting. So get out there and be interesting, because ANYONE can work.
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