Years ago, I read the book The Soul Of A New Machine by Tracy Kidder. I remember a section at the end of the book where he talks about the machine being transferred from the hands of the engineers to the hands of marketers. This section came to mind last night as I attended the CT Tweet Crawl in Glastonbury, CT.

Unlike other social media gatherings I’ve attended where people stare down at their shoes and start conversations with lines like What app do you use to access twitter? Are you writing a Twitter app? Or my favorite, “Nice cell phone. Got any good mods on it?” This was a social media gathering that had moved from the hands of the geeks to the hands of the marketers. People asked, “What do you do? What do you Tweet about?” I felt vaguely uncomfortable and glanced longingly around to see if anyone else had a plastic pocket protector. No such luck.

As I waded into the conversations I explained that I had not been able to make it to any previous CT Tweet Crawls; they always conflicted with other events for me. However, I’ve been to plenty of other social media gatherings. Mostly, we talked about podcamps. However, it got me thinking about the first social media gathering I attended.

It was in 1982 in New York City. I was working at Bell Labs and participating in various discussions on Usenet. I posted an invite to a Halloween party we were having on a couple Usenet groups and several folks from various research labs showed up. Those were the days; geeks in costumes standing in a corner drinking beer and talking about routing algorithms. There was also the hardcore AI geek staring out the window talking to himself, I assume, but he could have been doing that anywhere.

On the other side of the country, friends were having parties that you could only attend if you had an at-sign in your address. This wasn’t the at sign of Twitters. These were the at signs of SMTP addresses according to RFC-821. Sure, sometimes they would allow someone with the double colons of a Decnet address or the exclamation point of a UUCP address into their parties, but really you needed to be able to take that address and create a route that would connect it to the SMTP world, usually through ucbvax. But I digress.

In the end, I had some fascinating discussions with people at the CT Tweet Crawl and I didn’t even have to stare out the window and talk to myself, although in these days of cell phones, that seems much more acceptable. I’m digging though my emails as well as the cards I collected and random other tasks to accomplish today. When I get a chance, I hope to write more about some of the interesting discussions about the CT Tweet Crawl.

So, have you been to any social media gatherings? What were they like for you?