Multiple Twitter personality disorder

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.