A Twitter Dilettante's (Me) First Tweetup With Susan Reynolds

I just got back from a Twitter meetup ("Tweetup") at Jimmy's in Herndon that Shashi gave me a heads-up on -- the featured attraction was Susan Reynolds, whose social media-enhanced battle with breast cancer was just written up in today's Washington Post.

As I've noted before, I'm still a Twitter dilettante -- I don't update all that frequently, and I've currently only got 21 followers and 14 people that I follow (and most of those folks are lurkers). But I'm still interested in the phenomena, and how people find ways to make it useful.

Had a bunch of conversations about different aspects of social media, blogging, New Media Jim, Second Life, the navel-gazing nature of the contemporary social-media-o-sphere, the DC tech community (as compared to that of, say, Boston, NYC, or SF), etc., and it was definitely intellectually stimulating (though, for my part, all I have to do is regurgitate the conventional wisdom and hot buzzphrases to feel intellectually stimulated).

I must admit, though, after 2 hours of trendwatching and futurecasting and social media pund-ification, I was ready to clear my head. I was going to stop by Carpool, though it was dreary enough out that I just decided to go home.

Also, even though I did meet a bunch of interesting folks tonight, I'm not sure how, or even if, I will be growing my Twitter contact list. I guess I'm still not sold on the whole "ambient intimacy thing." We'll have to see how that goes.

Tags: twitter, tweetup, susan reynolds