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what does Twitter look like from where you sit?

My Twitter Map

(Note: If you're looking for the post "What does Twitter Look Like?" then go here.)

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Well this is a rather amazing tool.

Marshall Kirkpatrick's recent piece on ReadWriteWeb about The Inner Circle of 10 Geek Heroes listed me as a person with whom the remarkable Beth Kanter interacts often on Twitter. Which surprised me a bit, only because I have been totally submerged in school for the last seven months getting an MBA at Simmons in Boston, and have radically curtailed my twitter usage (and bloggage) as a result of the intense and all-consuming workload of an accelerated MBA program. So I thought I was pretty well out of the loop -- things move fast on Twitter, and seem to have been moving even faster of late.

I love the visualization of my network that this tool provides -- you can tweak it in all sorts of ways, too, to find out who lives where (if your network is particularly complex geographically, as mine is), what they talk about, and what their network maps look like.

One of the most common things I hear in conversation with other Twitterers is Well, do you know so-and-so? And the answer is no, more often than you might think. Because Twitter provides you with a personalized view of a very broad and multi-layered conversation, it is easy to allow yourself to believe that your view is at all similar to the view of others... just because you share a few connections.

It's pretty worthwhile, I think, to take a moment and click on some of your friends' links within your network map -- see what Twitter looks like from where they sit, and maybe see what angles you've been missing.