Okay, I’ve said it before, but the Twitter-dot-com is a strange,
strange place.
As I’ve mentioned, I have two
Twitter accounts. First is a “professional” one, where I follow people
who…well, look—I’m trying to get in with the Agile, SaaS, interesting
enterprise software crowd, okay? In general I follow people who are high tech
subject matter experts (SMEs) in Big Data, Enterprise Social and specific
companies I’m interested in working for. About 98% of my tweets there are to do
with Big Data, Enterprise social and specific companies I’m interested in
working for. Occasionally I’ll toss in a human-interest comment; but usually
that’s directed at a SME or someone working for a company I’m…well, you get the
drift.
The other is the one I associate with this blog. The
people I follow there are ones I think are going to be just plain
interesting—writers, performers, smart-asses, publishers, journalists, whack-jobs; people who’ve tweeted
something that gets me thinking, people who make me laugh, people who piss me
off. I’m more inclined to reply than to retweet this crowd; which is the
opposite of my nothin’-but-SaaS account.
So—with maybe five or six as overlap—two essentially
and entirely different subsets of the Twitterverse.
And at no time has this divide been more in evidence than
this afternoon, after the Asiana Airlines plane crash at SFO.
My blog account lit up with tweets about the crash—the fragmentary
bits sent out by a few passengers on the plane (it was apparently carrying
people bound for the Silicon Valley; of course they were taking pix and tweeting even as they were being evacuated), tweeted & retweeted, augmented
by dribs and drabs of speculation, until it was a complete tsunami of mixed
information and misinformation.
But it was totally vibrating with the event.
Meanwhile, back at the Big Data ranch, the SMEs have been
spewing out their same auto-tweets of “sage” Big Data/Social advice, along with
the usual “inspirational”
quote nonsense. Exactly as they do every other minute of every other day. There was a brief spurt of maybe three tweets about the crash for every 100 SME chirps (mostly from the news outlets) and then back to business as usual. Literally.
It’s like there are two different Twitter planets, and I’m caught in some bizarre vortex of Interwebs cognitive dissonance.
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