The power of the connected age

My value gained from Twitter has been increasing dramatically recently, like most things in life it takes time for real value to be achieved. Your account starts to settle down with people you've spoken to for a while, shared ideas, and with that trust starts to develop.

Trust is a slow process that can never happen hastily, patience is a virtue that I could never over emphasis.

You start to hear peoples voices more clearly, what their game plan is about, their motivations, their interests, their personality.

With these insights your connectivity or your ability to connect and engage with others improves. This is not something that can or should be rushed (apply the patience virtue again). There's nothing I dislike more than people shouting commands at me, I like people to take the time to listen and then form a more reasoned opinion.

I would say, I'm a conversationalist in real life and on-line, I enjoying talking to people and I like to hear others stories. I don't have the time to be an avid URL publisher, and rely on others in my feeds to provide me with those URL's that might interest me.

My conversational inclination often finds me posting on Twitter comments that others might find pointless, but for me this often the important content I enjoy reading in others feeds, "What, so you drink tea too! Wow!". It might sound banal, but as long as it is backed up with interesting content, statements, information shares and conversation, these little life-line posts are important for me.

Recently this connectivity has allowed me to share information from my stream that I think might be relevant to other Twitterers. Putting people in touch with people I've talked to on-line with others that they may not know. Rather than using the #followfriday technique, actually passing direct messages to others about other streams they should follow.

This kind of networking should improve the value of not just my network, but other users out there. Hopefully this kind of connectivity could actually improve "things" globally. I'm not talking about cure poverty and famine, but heck, it might help!

Is this too grand a claim for social media networking, perhaps, but honestly I don't think it is. Okay, this kind of connectivity is not going to happen every day, but tools like Twitter, Friendfeed etc. are going to improve the mathematical chance of it happening.

I mentioned in previous post about the conversation with Chris Brogan and Nova Spivack relating to Twitter interfacing with Twine, this was an example of this networking happening first hand. Sure, Chris and Nova may have ended up talking via other methods had social media not existed, but it does exist, and it did increase the probability of the them talking.

Now this conversation didn't solve any global issues, and conversations that do might be very rare, but all of this connectivity is going to help the prospects.

Don't worry I am not that naive to think that all of this connectivity couldn't also lead to lots of negative issues cropping up and equally it could lead to negative actions being taken, but I think the positivity to be gained will outweigh these.

I am going to talk more about conversation and the value of conversation very soon, but for now I'm going to leave this post.

Here's to connectivity, may it bring fruitful relationships and solve problems.

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