Geek World: The Art of Being Social

The trend being embraced by both young and old the world over can be found everywhere. It’s in the air, it’s in the dirt, it’s in the sea. It’s Twitter and everybody’s at it!

Twitter is a web based SMS service offered free to it’s users. From corporate giants to grandma, everybody is using it to broadcast small messages of 140 characters or less to anyone willing to listen. Users can choose to follow others and receive updates in their ‘feed‘, a chronological list of messages from the users you subscribe to.

While only 4 years old, Twitter boasts more than 100 million users world wide and everybody is taking notice. With so many people all tweeting at each other it’s amazing that anyone can make friends but that’s just what’s happening. Once the domain of people meeting the like minded, twitterers are connecting based on location. Especially noticeable in smaller cities, twitterers are finding each other and forming community groups who are fun, friendly and charitable.

A core function of  Twitter is it’s trending topics. Trending topics are a short list, of usually ten to twenty subjects, which the Twitter community are tweeting about. These trends are generally categorised by location. From the entire world to a few short kilometres, Twitter cleanly reports the popular goings on in the community.

Perth, my home town, is a tiny blip on the Twitter radar and it’s relatively small Twitter community is creating some unusual results in the trending topics. In Perth, topics don’t trend, people do! The community in Perth is so familiar with each other that they don’t tweet into space, they tweet at each other. Constantly mentioning each other makes themselves a trend and it is truly fantastic. It makes Twitter so much more personable, friendly, engaging and warm. To be in such a familiar group does make you feel like you belong. It’s a positive way forward for social media and I hope to see it form in other parts of the world.

In this screenshot from Trendmap the trends for Perth on the 4th of August can be seen. With the exception of the first two trends due to the looming Australian federal election all the other are normal local Perth people including myself (@jaso32) down in 7th. They aren’t celebrities, though I think @jasonjordan would like to be, they are regular, hard working Perth people participating in community discussion.

Underneath all the marketing, viral campaigning and consumer trending, Perth has been able to embrase the true meaning of social media. The art of being social.

Has anybody seen this type of trend anywhere else in the world?

About Jason

Jason is an amateur writer, amateur comedian and amateur author from the down-under land of convicts, Australia. He hopes one day he will be paid for at least one of those things so he can rub out the amateur and earn money for more Apple products. When he’s not not being paid for doing what he loves, Jason is a father of three young kids and supports his geek qualifications by schooling newbs about why Facebook is so 2007 at every opportunity. Jason discovered coffee at 30 so he thinks he is a grown up now. If he could marry his iPhone he would.

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