... and Twitterville is about Tbashers
[TBashers--a diverse, but highly connected crowd. Photo by Ken Yeung]
It was a big week end for me. Yeah, I observed a milestone birthday, but that was almost beside the point. The big tomato of my week end was TBASH, my Twitterville book launch party.
My first purpose for Tbash was of course to sell books. It is my view that my Twitter community will have greater influence on Twitterville's marketplace fate than anyone else. This is a book about them, more than for them, but what they say about my book is more likely to determine its fate than any other factor, or so it seems to me.
I invited quite a few of the people who I profiled in Twitterville, as well those acknowledged in the book for giving me stories and ideas which I used. More than 50 of them received Twitter-blue buttons to wear when they arrived. I asked everyone else to go up to the badge-people and ask them their stories and to share their own.
So a good portion of the conversation became people telling their Twitter stories, which quickly led to new Twitter stories. For example, I met Perrine Crampton, who it turned out was the daughter of someone I worked for more than 40 years ago. But what I loved the most was seeing folk like Scott Townsend of United Linen in Bartlesville, Okla., who is in the book talking with Aneta Hall of Pitney Bowes and the two discovering through #tbash how much common ground they shared in Twitterville.
This was my night, perhaps, but more than that this was a night for people who knew each other only on Twitter to discover when they met they were already old friends. There were lots of hugs, handshakes and smiles wherever I looked.
A lot of that happened and it was extremely cool to see.
Tweeter came from Washington State, Oregon, Southern California, Oklahoma, Texas, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, DC, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Hampshire and probably a few states I had not heard about. They were diverse by age (9 to 89), profession (enterprise, home office; technology to a regional laundry service) and in all sorts of other ways.
But they stood on a common ground called Twitterville.
Now they go home and read the 225 books they purchased.
Those who browsed at the party, who will be the earliest influencers of Twitterville conversations sometimes read small excerpts during the party. Their facial expressions sometimes seemed to reveal a certain ambivalence.
Should I be worried?
Overall, however there seemed to be a lot of photos depicting people who had a T-blast at T-bash.
Yesterday morning I invited the folk from out of town and a few of my closer Bay Area Twitterville friends to a brunch in my backyard where smaller number of people could have longer and more personal conversations until they caught airplanes or work they couldn't avoid.
It always is nce when old friends get to meet each other in the real world.
Thank ou everyone. For me it was about the best party weekend I ever had.
