The light warm rain fell on the hard cold snow, producing an eerie mist rising from the ground. @ahynes1 maneuvered his old hybrid into a diagonal parking spot on Main Street in Middletown, CT. He looked at the dilapidated awnings of local stores where young men loitered. He glanced at the pile of junk in his car. Anything of value was sufficiently buried in the clutter of the front seat.

He grabbed an unmarked brown bottle from the pile. If he had had more time, he would have labeled it “@ahynes1’s highly tweeted hard cider”. He had documented many aspects of brewing and bottling his hard cider; key talking points being about buying local produce, like the sweet cider he had used, and about handcrafting.

As he walked down the street, a young man approached him. “You going to the Tweetup?” the young man asked.

“Yeah, are you @dacort?” @ahynes1 responded. They had never met face to face but they knew of each other from their online writings. @dacort nodded. “I’m @ahynes1,” the older man said, reaching out to shake @dacort’s hand.

The walked into Pho Mai, a small Vietnamese restaurant on Main Street. The restaurant had about six tables. Two or three tables had couples sitting at them enjoying their lunch. One table, sitting closest to the kitchen had an unattended laptop, and two other tables had been pushed together, making room for four people to eat together. At these tables, @joecascio and @juliedarling were sitting.

They greeted @ahynes1 and @dacort as they entered the restaurant. As with @dacort, @ahynes1 felt that he knew both @joecascio and @juliedarling from their online writing. In addition, he had met both of them at a bar in Chester a month or two earlier.

@juliedarling was a regular at Pho Mai and @ahynes1 had been to Pho Mai once before with his wife, @khynes2000 when they were returning from Hartford after @ahynes1 had liveblogged the Citizens Election Program hearing.

@dacort wrote various programs to analyze social networks on Twitter. It seemed a logical outgrowth of his work on data security, and the discussion revolved around first followers, data visualization and other geeky topics.

There was a brief digression into steam punk which got @ahynes1 thinking. The small restaurant with some of the best Vietnamese food in Connecticut, the bottles of local hard cider, and the discussions about using emerging technology to foster communications, instead of relying on trusted names in broadcast media telling everyone what they needed to know, interspersed with ads for large multinationals serving up homogenized culture, almost felt like the backdrop to a dysutopian science fiction story.

These tweeters were part of an alternative culture, using emerging technology to find local niches of good food and other quality products. Yet there wasn’t the aspect of the sinister overlord trying to thwart these heroes. Instead, the dominant culture seemed mostly blissfully unaware of tweetups like these and at most, a few educators tried to keep stories about such gatherings from minors out of an uninformed fear about possible sexual predators that lurk online.

With the meal over, our intrepid tweeters headed back to their families with good food in their bellies and friendships renewed.