Prelude Interactive

I’m going to bloom into a perfect old dude someday, because even now, I only adopt new things with a fair measure of grumbling and wariness.  To wit, I made fun of Twitter for months – mainly with references to ‘Twits’ instead of Tweets – before being shamed into accepting it at my first Austin Social Media Club meeting.  I really didn’t see the point of a service which restricted you to 140 characters in a world already suffering from a short attention I should really cash that check that’s been sitting on my desk.

Even now, I only kind of get it.  I haven’t set up the kinds of automated searches, auto-follows, and other twaintenance tools that the pros use.  I’m barely proficient at using #tags.  I explain it to the still wary as “Like your Facebook wall, but public, and that’s it.”  But, what I’ve seen so far reminds me of Conway’s Game of Life.  From a simple set of rules, fairly complex behaviors and structures result.  By swapping private profile data for an open, and seemingly backwards, method of connecting with others, Twitter has become an amazing tool and service which is only starting to get awkward attention from the mainstream press.  I still don’t like the habit of adding ‘tw’ to everything twitter related (Tweeps, etc), but OK FINE, it’s actually an effective way to label concepts and services as being within the Twitter sphere.

A lot of people in the non-profit community use it to network, exchange notes, share links, to do the kinds of informal relationship building that used to only happen with people in your office.  A few adventuresome causes have made a splash by raising surprising sums in a short amount of time.   It seems like the time is ripe for some big, awesome, stuff to happen.

The Twestival

Along comes the Twestival, complete with Austin branch, to try and deliver.  There have been Tweet-Ups and Tweet-Mobs and Tweetootenannys before, but I haven’t heard of anything quite on this scale.  What I like about this is that while the internet has promised to bring people together, it really hasn’t been a worthy competitor to the town diner, the church, the school, the local bar, and other community institutions where you make new friends.  Even with Facebook, you usually have to meet someone first, judge them silently, and then pretend to be friends with them.  Half the people I ‘know’ on Twitter I’ve never met, and may never meet.  Some of them are stellar people in Austin that I never would have run across otherwise, mainly because I rarely leave my house.

I also like that the Twestival has chosen a universal, sort of random, and completely unobjectionable cause:  Water.  Earth and Wind don’t really get people excited, and Fire is too controvercial.  Water’s great, and I’d be kind of a jerk if I didn’t want everyone to have some.

I fret a little bit that this will come off as a bunch of hipsters patting each other on the back, but it’s not often that the Beauty Bar manages to fund two wells in Africa in a night.  Besides, it’s up to the young and fashionable to lead the @unfollowed masses into an orgiastic future, right?

It’ll be the first few events like this that determine how mass events are run through Twitter (and similar services) in the future, or whether or not.  It will determine if big organizations like the American Cancer Society and the Red Cross will need to continue to spend millions of dollars on marketing and organizing (and not research or relief), or if they can transition sooner to a cheaper, more powerful method.

If you read this far, and live in Austin or any other city where this is happening, go get a ticket and meet me there.