By Nadine Kam

Nadine Kam photo
Guy Kawasaki on camera during Saturday’s Tweetup. He says that when he’s a billionaire he’ll throw a proper party by renting a room and springing for pupu and drinks.

Headed for Hawaii Prince Hotel Saturday for an impromptu “Twitter-fueled meetup with local geeks and ubergeek Guy Kawasaki,” as the gathering was billed.

The guerilla meetup came together poolside, in about 24 hours, just to take advantage of the fact that Kawasaki was in town and open to answering all our questions about technology, the future of Twitter and to confirm from his now outsider’s perspective, that Hawaii state government is indeed dysfunctional. If rail is to be built, for instance, we all agreed it should — like all major cities — connect the major destinations of airport, downtown, university and Waikiki. What I feel is once this major segment is completed, operational AND breaking even, then add in the ‘burbs. What we don’t need is a train that starts in Kapolei and goes nowhere. Just as with the Aloha Stadium, I just don’t trust our government and their contractors (cronies) to get it right the first time. We don’t need a $4 billion albatross, any more than we need a vanity convention center that doesn’t appear to be booking conventions.

Sorry, just had to get that out. Anyway, some of you may remember the Kalihi kid became famous 20 years ago as an Apple evangelist, went on to found the venture capital firm Garage Technology Ventures, Truemors and now Alltop.com. So, it’s enlightening to hear him asking the same questions as the rest of us, as to where Twitter and the Internet is taking us. Twitter’s architecture is not all that stable, so it was kind of funny that he’s worried it’ll implode one day and leave us all without our networks. He has 14,000 to 15,000 followers and said it’s hard to get that many from any other of the social networking sites.

Before going, I was trying to talk one of my friends into going, and trying to explain the world of Twitter. It’s as weird for those on Twitter to meet people who haven’t heard of it, as it is for someone outside the Twitter universe to comprehend its utility. She ended up saying something like, “Omigod, it’s this whole underworld that people don’t even know about,” before deciding to pass.

At face value, a random Twitter feed looks tedious. Thousands of little meaningless posts, all answering the question: “What are you doing now,” whether it’s attending a concert, eating something wonderful, or just lazing around the house. It’s considered microblogging, and I call it a lazy person’s way of blogging without the commitment of really writing. Twitter posts are limited to 140 characters, the equivalent of two tight sentences.

I became addicted to it fairly quickly because it’s a faster method of getting word out to people. Much faster than completing a regular news story, and even faster than posting to this blog.

When you see an interesting post, you can opt to follow the individual who posted the comment. Like joining any new network, you start out solo and kind of wonder if your messages, called “tweets” are being read at all and if anyone actually cares. What was weird for me was talking about fashion in a venue where a majority of people are tech geeks who don’t necessarily care about fashion. Even if I was trying to target the handful of fashion people on Twitter, inevitably, I’d post something about what I was wearing, and a typical geek response would be, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

And the answer is nothing. That’s what Tweets are. My individual posts represent nothing but an observation, and experience, a temporary state of mind, but in the aggregate, might add up to tell the story of the person behind them, and BTW, can I sell you on my blog? Guy said he didn’t join Twitter to make friends, but to promote Alltop, and Twitter crowd-sourcing has helped him create topics as well as point to things of interest to him. I’m directed to interesting stories all the time by other Twitterers.

For me, the great thing about Twitter has been access to people like Kawasaki, who I probably would never have met otherwise, even in journalist capacity because any interview with him would most likely fall to a business, rather than feature writer. The meetup was a great way to put faces to names I only know online.

For a little bit of the conversation, check out Neenz’s video at www.ustream.tv

For a photo of the group posted by Guy at Twitpic.com: http://twitpic.com/39re

You can follow my Twitter posts at www.twitter.com/fashiontribe

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 6th, 2008 at 8:04 pm and is filed under Life online, media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.