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back before i came here – back home in albuquerque, in my awesome third-floor apartment with a beautiful view of the mountains (the pic at the top of my website is a photo taken from my balcony/patio) – i had a webcam in my living room… yes, something possessed me to broadcast a view of my living room to the whole world, 24 hours a day… there was even another pointed out my living room window, showing the mountains and i lived right in “balloon alley”, so, the cam also let you see the hot air balloons that floated by every morning, sometimes close enough that i could probably toss the pilots breakfast burritos :P
but, i say it was for the whole world to see and, in reality that wasn’t the case… i mean, i’ve had a website for years and very low traffic and i like it that way – i’m not selling anything or benefitting in any way from traffic and it also keeps me off the radar of hackers, spammers and other trouble-makers so there are several reasons why i’m happy with a low traffic site… the main traffic i get – and my webcam got – was friends and family… my dad had a widget on his desktop that showed my living room cam and it meant a lot to him be able to see me on a constant basis… the point is it wasn’t “for the whole world to see”, i knew almost nobody was watching but i did it anyway…
i have loved webcams for years and to this day, i have a widget on my desktop that displays four cams – i have three set to the only live cams i know of in albuquerque (ever since the wonderful abqcam.com shut down) and one i change – sometimes to the cam that points at a spot at the pier where i used to hang out in Hermosa Beach, California – sometimes to the cam at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas that pans around casinos i used to spend a lot of time at – or just to a cam i come across that is a place i find interesting…
anyway, i don’t know where my urge comes from to broadcast my life, but i always got a kick out of it… i miss my webcam… i wish i had one now, but it isn’t just my bachelor life on display, i live here with mom and terra and wesley – so, i have to settle for ‘again someday’…
but, see, that’s where twitter comes in… i’m not so unusual anymore – tons of people are “broadcasting their life for the whole world to see”, so to speak…
my webcam was an answer to the question “what are you doing right now?”…
my cam was never off but the software i used had a mode to just take a snap and upload it, rather than have it on all the time… well, twitter is like that snap-not-stream mode…
twitter is one of those things that someone can describe for an hour to you but until you actually have it, you can’t really see the point… as soon as i was on, i took off and haven’t stopped… it was just the next broadcast medium for me… and i dislike a lot of what twitter has become… for instance, it is very rare i go to the site or use a twitter client — twitter is almost purely a cell phone experience for me… i am following maybe a hundred people and for quite a while just kept changing, every few weeks or so, who i got updates from to my phone… now, i have turned off pretty much everyone except people here in alamogordo — i have every single one of them set to sms delivery (i use the indispensible http://twuzzer.com to keep an eye out for new twitterers in my area)… throughout the day, my phone beeps and there is a twitter and every one of them is local, except for my sis-in-law in vegas and one or two other very infrequent posters…
remember in The Dark Knight when he had everyone’s cell phone providing surveillance around Gotham? yeah, that’s kinda’ what i’m doing… if a twitterer posts in the alamogordo area, i get it to my phone… and almost no other tweets…
so, it’s kinda’ like getting webcam snaps from all around alamogordo… that’s why web-only/client-only twitterers are people i can’t relate to… twitter is many things to many people and ok fine, but i would love to see what it would be like if twitter was phone-only… the way they intended it, i suspect… and one reason i like http://zannel.com so much – almost all of the posts are from people’s phones, not the site or a desktop client – and actually delivering answers to the “what are you doing right now?” question… most of the non-local updates i get on my phone are from the handful of people i follow on zannel…
btw, see, this town is tiny and i’m a big city boy having lived in/around L.A., vegas, dallas, orlando (i loved albuquerque – big enough to have everything but small enough that nothing is more than half an hour away) and i go crazy because there is just nothing at all to do here… so, while i’m here i have lately thought hey, there’s only so many twitterers here – maybe 20 active currently – so, why not continually hear from them what they do? and, sure there are a couple that use twitter to advertise (*spits*) and a few that are what i called above “web-only/client-only” but it is the best chance i have of continually seeing into the lives of a truly diverse cross section of locals… where they go, what they do, etc…. i’m curious… i’ve always loved webcams and now i also love twitter, for the same reasons – when people actually use it that way – as a text webcam…
i twitter and formerly webcam’ed for those who were curious about me and i love being able to get, in real time, the ‘text webcam snapshots’ from people i’m curious about…
once my time here is done and i move back to civilization, i’ll change out whose tweets hit my phone to keep my finger on the pulse, as it were, of people in many cities… but, the webcam mentality is my favorite kind of twitterer… tell me where you are right now, what you see and hear, what you’re doing, and i’ll keep doing the same – whether by cam or twitter or whatever comes next…
[posted from my mint metallic green MotoQ 9c]
