ideas

Yesterday my first tweet took off - and it was a blast.

Most Twitter updates are only interesting to a few people. Actually, most Twitter updates are only interesting to the person writing the tweet (it’s what they’re called, I’m not making it up!). So most of them die right out of the gate.

But, because there are millions of Twitter users, at least a small percentage of Tweets are intriguing to many people. Because the trend has grown to forward on content that you enjoy, a tweet by one individual can rapidly reach thousands or millions of individuals. That is the exciting power of a service that is commonly disregarded as a self-indulgent and trivial.

I’ve Twittered 701 times over 2.5 years, but the tweet I sent out yesterday was the first to gain momentum and live on past my personal network of 150 or so people.

Actually, it wasn’t even my tweet. That’s the best part, I simply passed it along, from someone much more famous and profound than me.

John Maeda is a smart, smart man. He used to run the MIT Media Lab, now he’s the president of RISD. He gets science, technology, creativity and thought. As a result 11,000 people follow his Twitter updates. He’s undeniably worth following. On Sunday he Tweeted;

“Shared by a friend at Bravo: “You pick a boss, not a job. Who you work for can matter more than what you do.”

That stuck with me. I came back to it several times over the next day – couldn’t stop thinking about the consequences of its meaning on the work we do. I close colleague once said off hand “…the more I think about it the more I realize we’re not in the design business, we’re in the people business. From there comes design, but the focus has to be on people first.”

Apparently other’s were compelled by this notion because it was forwarded on from me, and then again, and then again… By the time it stopped Maeda’s tweet had been seen by 2,929 as a result of my forward alone.

An idea, one snippet of content, can be interpreted in so many ways – but when it catches on and connects it’s a sight to see and a thrill to have supported.