Kris, I love the concept. I’ve been hearing about your virtual gathering. Good luck!

Kari, thanks for offering your reflections. It would be great if you could report back and let us know how being added to the list has given (or has not) you a tool to increase impact. Thanks!

Now, I am not one to count the number of “followers,” “friends,” or “clicks” as a measure of much of anything – certainly not success or impact. The followers I had pre SUL were folks I’d met during the past couple of years. Perhaps we shared a hallway conversation at a conference or they stumbled across the Social Citizens blog and decided to keep in touch via Twitter. Whatever the case, I probably only genuinely knew a fraction of them. Yet, there was something that brought us together in brief 140 character sound bites.

My relationship with Twitter has been one of give and take, a way to share ideas and collaborate with a diverse audience. It’s transformed the way I approach projects both personally and professionally, and it’s allowed me to touch and influence many people in a quick unobtrusive way. If you care, you might click on a link – if you don’t, you won’t.

But, I think Twitter’s move is a game changer and not just for the individuals and nonprofits who were added to the list. It’s a game changer because all of the sudden people who are more than likely not living in the “social change bubble” that you and I find ourselves in are being exposed to bite sized ideas and opportunities to give back, volunteer, donate, etc. that they wouldn’t have necessarily been exposed to otherwise.

I think I’ll stop there because this is turning into a blog post that I think I may have to write – but thanks for following the development, and I look forward to hearing how other recent additions to the SUL are finding their experience.

What has surprised me the most about my still limited experience with Twitter is how powerful a tool it has become for me on the info gathering front. Originally, I was expecting the real value to come from the gems contained within individual tweets. On the contrary, the value has come from the vast amount of “retweeting” (people forwarding other people’s tweets) that goes on. In the same way that a word cloud (www.wordle.net) shows which words are more important within a larger grouping, the redundancy of retweets tells me which stories, ideas, commentaries, etc. are rising to the surface of public awareness.

There is a ton of noise on Twitter to be sure, but once you get used to separating the wheat from the chaff, it becomes a powerful mechanism for predicting what folks will be talking about around the water cooler.

Nice story Sean.