CHAPTER 1 Hello Twitter kmakice For a thing to have meaning, it must have context. I can remember what life was like without Twitter. The many interesting thoughts popping out of my brain throughout the day had to fight for supremacy. Like an intel- lectual Thunderdome, only one thought could emerge to become a blog. No one knew when I was sleeping and when I was watching Battlestar Galactica on my TiVo. I had no way of being alerted when someone local was heading to Chicago so that I could express to that person my love of Edwardo's stuffed pizzas as a passive hint to deliver. Before Twitter, my connection with the other people in my academic program was constrained by time and space. I could only inquire about their work or ask what they were eating if we were in the same room with overlapping moments of free time. My news about hurricanes and earthquakes was limited to what I could glean from CNN.com and Weather Underground. There were no personal accounts of mass evac- uations, nothing to tell me instantly where someone was when the ground started shaking. Mercifully, a solution emerged. Twitter--a channel for sharing individual status up- dates with the world--has brought value to the mundane. We have evolved out of that bygone era and into a world measured 140 characters at a time. Kelly Abbott (@KellyAbbott) of Dandelife introduced me to Twitter through a little Flash widget featured in the sidebar of his blog. It displayed a running list of short journal entries about his life. I clicked and registered my own Twitter account (see Figure 1-1) about a week before the service exploded onto the scene with an award- winning presence at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference * in March 2007. * South By Southwest is an annual conference held in Austin, Texas to showcase the latest in music, film, and interactive media. It started in 1987 as a small music festival, and now draws over 11,000 people each year. 1