I started Twitter the way many people do: by mocking it. \u00c2\u00a0“Why would anyone want to know what I’m having for breakfast?” \u00c2\u00a0After enough positive reviews, I figured what’s the harm in giving it a try? \u00c2\u00a0I tried. It moved from “try” to an interesting experiment to a real medium. \u00c2\u00a0I have more regular Twitter readers than I do blog readers. \u00c2\u00a0I have more Facebook readers, but they get my Twitter feed, so that point is kind of moot. \u00c2\u00a0If I want to say something, and I want to be heard, Twitter is my biggest megaphone – and people listen.<\/p>\n
Today was a new threshold – Twitter gave me information that no one else could. \u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
Over the weekend, my iPhone dropped off the net. \u00c2\u00a0No text messages, no emails, no voicemail, no phone calls. \u00c2\u00a0(Note the order there. \u00c2\u00a0My “phone” is rarely used for phone calls.) \u00c2\u00a0I was pretty sure the phone was fine, and confirmed that by traveling around. \u00c2\u00a0I know<\/strong>\u00c2\u00a0my house wasn’t the problem because I’d been using it lots at home. \u00c2\u00a0AT&T’s support was unavailable. \u00c2\u00a0I entered a support request on an awful form, one that had a required field for “problems with your phone” even though my phone had no problems. \u00c2\u00a0Still no response on that, 48 hours later. \u00c2\u00a0At times I marvel that I willingly give a company $500\/year for such crappy service.<\/p>\n I also tweeted<\/a>: “Having all sorts of problems with my cell signal. AT&T appears to be having equipment problems in Arlington\/Lexington.” \u00c2\u00a0It was a message in a bottle. \u00c2\u00a0I didn’t expect an answer. \u00c2\u00a0Really, I was just posting to a few hundred friends in case they were wondering why I wasn’t returning their call.<\/p>\n Lo and behold, I got a reply. \u00c2\u00a0I have no idea who this guy is. \u00c2\u00a0Apparently he lives less than a mile away from me. \u00c2\u00a0But he knew my problem, and he knew \u00c2\u00a0why<\/strong>\u00c2\u00a0I was having the problem<\/a>: “@dunster<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0I saw your Arlington\/AT&T related Tweet. The tower on Route 2 near Dow Ave is fuct. They’ve been working on it all weekend.” \u00c2\u00a0Here’s this guy I don’t know, but he can see my problem and see the cause of the solution – and he can share the information in a meaningful way, and the world can see the answer.<\/p>\n This is a powerful network effect.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I started Twitter the way many people do: by mocking it. \u00c2\u00a0“Why would anyone want to know what I’m having for breakfast?” \u00c2\u00a0After enough positive reviews, I figured what’s the harm in giving it a try? \u00c2\u00a0I tried. It moved from “try” to an interesting experiment to a real medium. \u00c2\u00a0I have more regular Twitter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","category-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}