I think I accidentally invited you to Twitter when I was playing around with it the night I wrote this post – I was trying to see if you had a Twitter ID (I assumed you did given how much you’ve written about it) so sorry if you got an email from Twitter on my behalf.

Accidentally offending people with online communication has been a problem ever since AOL Instant Messenger – even back then you could correct the issue in real-time but the problem stems from the difficulty of communicating tone of voice. We don’t realize how big an impact tone has on our interpersonal communication until we have to do without a lot of it.

@John,

GoRun is an awesome idea – I just read over your description of it. The idea of aggregating subject-specific tweets makes it feasible to build a real twitter community around a specific area of interest. That’s a great concept!

I really enjoy the personal intercommunication on Twitter – one of my readers sent me a direct Tweet and I think it’s a good opportunity to get to know some of my own readers better. Blog comments are a good method too, but they’re not as personal as a Tweet is.

The truly great thing about it is that it’s a very simple, basic “medium”, and how you use it is entirely up to you. Purely social, marketing/lead development, broadcasting (some folks do this–Seth Godin in particular. I don’t find it particularly “in tune” with the medium, but hey, there’s no rule against it).

It takes a while before it to make sense to you, as it’s basically whatever you make of it, but hopefully you’ll find your stride with it and enjoy it.

I created a little Twitter app for runners on my site: http://www.hellasound.com/GoRun Creating the app was dead simple, and how folks use it is one of the things I’m looking forward to finding out.

I’ll follow you as soon as I hit submit on this comment

Though in fairness a lot of that is because I’m covered on Techmeme. The Techmeme algorithm is based on how many people link to you and I’m about as opposed to the other people covered by the service as anyone so I suspect I’ll be cast out eventually. But while the opportunity exists I feel a certain responsibility to be the “voice of the opposition” on topics where no one else is giving the other side.

Since everyone loves Twitter unconditionally on Techmeme that means a lot of Twitter commenting.

Anyway, I hope it works out for you. My only concern would be the phrasing. It’s hard enough conveying what you actually mean when you have unlimited characters to work from. Sending messages of only 140 characters to professional contacts seems a little scary to me. Most people aren’t easy to offend but I’ve found those that are look just like those who aren’t. So you don’t discover them until they’re offended by something they thought you said.