I have had a lot of posts about twitter lately but it really seems to be where I am doing the majority of my personal communication now. I love it because it is 100% mobile and no matter where I am, I can access it somehow. It has eliminated my one line e-mails to and from friends which has had significant impact on my email load.

But there is the thing: Twitter is global, real-time, interactive and deceiving. I say it is deceiving because you think that short little bursts of text would beget a similarly short response. But this is how it actually happens as I’m getting ready to go to bed for the night:

Friend1: @acafourek Did you see this? http://tinyurl.com/36whqy

Me: @friend Yeah I love Legos and I love Star Wars so it is hilarious! Very original!

Friend2: @acafourek You like Star Wars? I had no idea! Did you know that @newperson also likes Legos?

Friend1: @acafourek Yeah, I got it from @randomdude

Friend3: @Friend2 & @acafourek Star Trek is better than Star Wars. But you like YouTube, try out Viddler.

NewPerson2: Retweet from @Friend1: Did you see this? http://tinyurl.com/36whqy

And now folks, we are off to the friggin’ races. Because now I have to come back and defend Star Wars against Star Trek, give my two cents on Viddler and then check out@ newperson @randomdude and @NewPerson2 to see if I want to follow them. That involves checking out their latest tweets, their overall follow/following ratio and glancing at their blog if they have one. Time spent watching Eddie Izzard’s hilarious Death Star Canteen bit rendered by Legos: 3 minutes. Time spent in follow up conversation about it: 2 hours.

My point is this: The Conversation will happen without you if you don’t show up for it. The above example is just an example of a potentially funny exchange between friends about a hilarious YouTube clip, but what generally happens is someone will tweet an idea, observation or question about any topic and then sometimes it will start a buzz of conversation. If you don’t see it until the next morning, you generally miss out on the conversation completely so you have to jump into the fray right then. And to be courteous, if you try and refute someone else’s stance, you are obligated to read their response which means you have to stick around for awhile.

Some of the great things about twitter are that it is not as in-your-face realtime as IMing someone nor is it as prone to drawn-out treatises as forums are. But at the same time, to truly engage with other people you have have a sort of timeliness about your interaction and this is what I’ve noticed start to happen on twitter. There are bursts of conversation and then periods of relative calm. It seems like between 9:00 and 10:00 CST is when it gets really fired up. My theory is that most of the world is awake right around then. It is morning in India, afternoon in Australia and late evening in the Americas. Much of our worldwide network of friends is available for bouncing things to and from.

I call it The Conversation because it is when there is a buzz going somewhere about just about anything you might want to jump into. And as much as my part of The Conversation involves twitter, it is actually multi-platform. You can tweet a link to a video or a blog, have a discussion on twitter and in the blog’s comments, Stumble the link, share it on del.icio.us and post it to a relevant facebook group. This is what sucks us in is that distribution of interaction, the multi-channel feedback mechanism that drives the entire idea of social media. Since it lives on different sites and is not run by any select group of people..it pretty much pops up whenever it wants and focuses on whatever topic happens to seize the day.

You have no control over when The Conversation happens or what it is about. With that kind of uncertainty, you had really better stick around and see where it goes, huh?

Note: I spent far longer looking for a picture/image/graphic to include in this post than I would care to admit. I found none that Iiked or were not cheesy…so if you have one in mind, let me know and I’ll include it.