Space tweets

It took me quite sometime to be convinced that Twitter is worth my time, but then, here I am tweeting my head off. I opened my account because it was becoming big, and because as a self-proclaimed techie, I couldn't not have one of those, but as my consistency in following up stuff is limited, I ended up posting very little. I just didn’t see the point of telling the world that I am having a coffee at this specific point of time.

Several ‘incidents’ lead me to change my position. The first was Paul going to Haiti for the earthquake operation, he tweeted his way through his mission and got a huge following including an article about him in the Irish Times. That got me jealous.

The second was the Guardian books on Twitter, a great way to follow their Twitter account to know about the literary world. This technology can actually be useful!

So I tweet away, a feat that gave me a very humble following of 85 people who decided that I am worth clicking the ‘follow’ button. I went on to write 140 digit messages about my own mission to Haiti and what I have seen and done, and that actually got me some complements.

Two nights ago, in a camp in Port-au-Prince, I had a long, semi-drunken argument with an Aussie who made fun of my Facebook, twitter, iPad, the world-is-connected-and-we-can’t-avoid it monologue. I argued passionately that we can not afford not to use new technologies while he gave me the all too familiar I love the smell of book pages and letter are personal. We ended up having another beer and reaching no conclusion, of course.

The reason I decided to write about Twitter today is because while looking at my account this morning, I noticed a photo from a member called Astro_Soichi who posted an image from space of the Bahamas. It took me a minute, and a fast visit to Wikipedia, to realise that Soichi Nouchi is actually tweeting from the International Space Station!

Soichi, as it turns out, is a Japanese aeronautics engineer who is “currently in space as part of the Soyuz TMA-17 crew and Expedition 22 to the International Space Station” and who apparently has a camera and internets access, exactly as you’d expect from a true Japanese. Soichi is tweeting little events and photos from his journey, and more than 140,000 people are following him.

I guess what makes things like Twitter interesting is the untargeted communications. You are sending a message to no one in specific, a message that total strangers can decide to pick or ignore, and it doesn’t matter if they do either. This reminds me a little bit of art where someone paints for no specific audience, random strangers will choose to appreciate or hate the painting, but it doesn’t matter, it fulfils the artists desire send a message.

Soichi, good luck up there, I hope your tweets won’t include “Twitter, we have a problem!”

And here are your 500 words for today.