Ticket to Ride

I think I get it now. It made no sense when people tried to explain it "You know, Twitter is like a mini-blog." What? But I took a ride on Twitter, and it was fun.


It started slowly. I only follow about 22 people on Twitter; most of them are tech folks and some of them are Jimmy Fallon. I'd seen lots of preparatory hoopla about the Apple introduction on Wednesday, the blogosphere has been intelligently speculating for weeks - months - years. Maybe 500 journalists were in heavy anticipation and lots of them were tweeting.  I happened to be stationed at my computer shortly before nine am when it started. 


The morning had had desultory comments of the hurry up and wait twitterers were experiencing. Right at nine things started to change. Suddenly 9 tweets appear on deck, then 7 more. Each was some version of "Steve Jobs walked onstage" As I watched in amazement, major thoughts came rolling at me in waves of tweets. The crowd immediately broadcast the specifications, the use of the word magic, the name iPad. Tweets came faster and faster, more data poured out as each twit sent out their personal characterizations of each feature or marketing point as it was revealed. I could barely keep up - I was praying my connection would hold. There were some frantic posts of failing features ( Twitter turned off lists temporarily!) Then came the price - and what an uproar!


As that settled down, I started to see a wave of comments by women - "Didn't Apple have any women on the team?" "Does Apple listen to women?" As the term #iTampon surged on Twitter someone dug up the 2006 MadTV spoof of Apple featuring the iPad - and the clip went everywhere. Later I read that there were 177,000 tweets about the Apple product introduction in the first couple of hours. I had been mildly interested, intrigued, and then totally swept away. I was exhilarated and exhausted. 


Today I found the chart below on ReadWriteWeb. This synopsis very closely matched the opinions I saw developing in the avalanche of tweets I enjoyed: