Twitter: You're On, Now What?

Two years ago I mentioned a tweet and people thought I was a twit. Now, John McCain gets noticed with praise for being a compulsive tweeter. Shaq tweets for attention. Demi prevents a suicide. Ashton takes on the news powerhouse CNN. And finally Queen Oprah sanctions the microblogging network officially into society.

Oh boy
Two years ago I was trading informative info and links. Now, I am filtering out the "now I am spreading jelly on my navel,now" tweeters. I will say I didn't unfollow the last one. She was hot. I will admit I keep my share of them around. Actually Twitter has in a spawned beyond what I had hoped it would be. I wanted to be able to sample and learn about people and culture I would never have in my lifetime. I've been on a "tweet date." She from Seattle and me from New Jerky. Though we never got into the heavy tweeting phase, we do still remain friends. Yes and the people who I talked about twitter with two years ago are like "are you on Twitter dude?" (Someone tell Frank Kern I'm light years ahead of him on that dude thing, okay?) I'm not so much upset about their "Doh" on Twitter as I am about being used to be the only one in my circle(s) who threw around "dude."

Lost in the twittersphere
Basically whats going on is people are doing "It's the rage, I gotta join thing." Hence, the deluge of of the "now I am spreading jelly on my navel, now" type stuff. I spotted a tweet the other day where a person just posted "Hi." It was interesting to say the least. I was actually wondering if this was an intellectual foray or some dink expecting four thousand people to tweet "Hi" back.

Power in numbers?
Seriously, what is Ashton Kutcher going to do with over a million tweets coming in? Is he going to hire ten thousand assistants to tweet back? He's already an international celebrity million of fanboys and girls. And is he the reason the whale now pops up tens times as much? I think not it must be Oprah's fault and the onslaught of "spreading jelly on my navel now" type. Still there is more to numbers. There is power to be had once we look past the psuedo-cultural fad effect.

My Twitterlutionary experience
I have watched Twitter grow from a barren wasteland to an ocean of tweets. First there were those who joined through the 30 Day Challenge. They flooded the Twittershere with a back. As they fell away in the backwash some remained friends frequent and infrequently tweeting along. Of course there came the porn invasion followed by the "spam I ams." Then internet marketers though they knew about this became to go "Duh" and jump on board. Soon the porn went away, organized spam fell off, and the idiot "I am a Guru because I wrote a post" explosion came along. Now, I find "more of the let me share with you this I ran across crowd" is regaining hold. Yes, we are going toward full circle. We are not totally there yet. For the record I reserve my right to keep my real world friends and a bunch of the cute "I am spreading jelly on my navel, now" followers because I want to.

The New Secret
Just like the other secret, it's really no secret at all. You can leverage those numbers. I have been performing some social networking type experiments with Twitter. The object is to seek ways to leverage my Twitter follower into being something more than the reason my Tweetdeck app chews up memory usage. Of course many of you are going to go, look and note, I don't have a terrabyte of followers. No, I don't. I do have a slower building core comprised of several core groups. The groups breakdown into several with shared interests, friends (OMG I am someone with actual friends on Twitter what could be wrong with me?) The interest groups share in leveraging of each other. Yes that is the new non-secret. I can say this because this is the original reason I hooked up with twitter to begin with. It's taken two years but it is now paying off in huge dividends.

My next phase of Twitter
I want to form an international mastermind group. I want a couple of people from each of the states and from as much countries, states and providences from around the world as possible. This is a global initiative of cultural interaction on Twitter. The reason? I want to hear their everyday perspectives. It's kind of an offshoot of my initiative in my younger single days to meet and date as many cultural diverse women as I could (And I did by the way.) Now, my objective is more mature which is not to say I would mind if they were all or mostly woman but some parts of you never die. It's like a Twitter Summit where we all just tell it as we see. The object is not to convince or change what another person may do or think. The object is to purely see the world from their eyes (tweets?). This will need people who are able to respect and are open to exploring cultural differences. The participants need not be intellectuals or any defined category. All they need to be is willing to be open and themselves. I may use a branch off account as this takes hold but for now I will be using my RichNaran account as I explore this option. As a writer I love to explore and Twitter right now is the tool to leverage exploration and more.

Have you asked yourself these questions?
Why are you on Twitter? Can you be leveraging Twitter in more positive ways? Can you see the potential in multiple areas of your life as I do? Are you just zoning out with your tweets? Are tweet dates going to rule over J-Dates? (Just kidding on that last one, but... Mr Opportunity Knocks) And the last and most obvious, is he or she tweeting with me while cheating on me? The possibilities are endless. Life does need it's balance. So, no one says you can't have some fun with the "spreading jelly on my navel now" crowd if you want to.