Welcome to 2008.

I was thinking recently, about Twitter and how it's really become the only social network that I regularly use. I decided to take a closer look at the platform and think about why I prefer Twitter over Facebook or Pownce or Jaiku. Yes, I like the mobility of being able to connect to it from my phone or the web or aim, and I like the simplicity of communicating in 140 characters but what I *love* about twitter is the community of people in it.

When I thought about it, I realized that Twitter is the first social network or "socnet" as many of us now call them, populated first by people of my own age. And it's not just Gen X, Baby Boomers and beyond in twitter - there are plenty of younger peeps using it. Speaking for myself, I have built a solid following of likeminded professionals that I "tweet" with every day, whom are my peers. That is very unique for a social network thus far. What is it, when you think about it, is a club. A meeting place, a hang out, a group of compatriots - but a virtual club - meeting at any time you choose. A proverbial treehouse where you can always find a friend inside.

These "tweets" or short dialogue conversations among people, have truly differentiated Twitter for me, because it's finally a "socnet" where people seem like, well, *people*. They aren't just bands who automatically "friend" me or profile pages with colorful widgets and photo albums, they are real time conversations with real people.

What twitter has done, is taken the chat room/bulletin board concept and made it accessible to many people globally and portable. Connecting and communicating from anywhere with large groups of people. That is HUGE. It's changing everything, for me. It's widening my circle of friends, contacts, knowledge, interests, thought processes and more.

Today, The Washington Post talked about the power behind Twitter, featuring the Frozen Pea Movement that I previewed for you just as it started. As of this afternoon, The Frozen Pea Fund had raised $7,171 for breast cancer research.

Not too shabby for a buncha socnet geeks;)

Hillary Clinton promises government blogs in an effort to entice voters

In a campaign speech in New Hampshire on Monday night, presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton suggested that blogs could play a key role in making the U.S. government more transparent.

According to Clinton, "We should even have a government blogging team where people in the agencies are constantly telling all of you, the taxpayers, the citizens of America, everything that's going on so that you have up-to-the-minute information about what your government is doing, so that you too can be informed, and hold the government accountable."

If corporations can blog successfully, why not government? Would be interesting to see though if government blogs could convince the rest of the blogosphere of their authenticity and honesty. Judging by the current level of mistrust of all things government, that should prove to be a difficult task. Maybe comparable to Wal-Mart's trials and tribulations entering the social media scene?

Update: Incidentally, the White House yesterday launched its first version of a blog - a travel blog designed to report about President Bush's trip to the Middle East. The Trip Notes from the Middle East seems more like an online diary than a real blog though since it lacks any interactive functions (there's no comments feature).

Web 2.0 & Social Media Slideshow

Here are the slides from our class discussion of social media and web 2.0. You will need to click on the slide to move from one slide to the next. The embedded video clips show up as a still rather than a video since I don't think Keynote exports embedded video to a Flash file. If you need to review the videos, just google them - you should be able to find them easily.



If you are interested in learning more about specific social media technologies and/or Web 2.0 sites, check out this page which contains a self-running slide show of over 1,400 Web 2.0 sites.