Twitter as an Organizing Tool

Crude Awakening is on twitter: @crudeawakening . Twitter is SMS/Web updates about the status of our organization. To receive Crude Awakening's updates to your phone (information about local meetings, field trips, conferences and peak oil news) simply text this message (minus the quotes): "follow crudeawakening" to the phone number 4040-4 . It will ask you for a user name - text one back and you are set getting updates to your phone. Please be aware of your texting package because twitter isn't totally free on that end...

If you aren't familiar with Twitter, you should be. A free SMS/Texting tool, if twitter seems totally pointless its because organizations haven't yet taken advantage of twitter on a large scale...at least they haven't gotten much attention for doing so. Many large news organizations are on Twitter, and Barack Obama recently announced Joe Biden as his vice president via Twitter.

Twitter allows one person from a phone OR from the web to send out announcements to anyone "following" them. The advantage of using Twitter over regular texting is that you don't need to know everyone's phone number, and you can be "followed" by people you've never met. In this way Twitter allows a two-way flow of followers, rather than the 'traditional' method of having to collect numbers or email addresses.

From a designer's standpoint Twitter is great because it allows you to totally customize the background image for the page...something that myspace allows, but not anyone else (not facebook, not meetup...) This might sound like a detail, but when it comes to branding its important especially in the age of such diversified branding spaces (social networks).

The Oil Drum @theoildrum is on Twitter, and I'm sure other peak oil sites aren't far behind. I think one of the biggest barriers to adoption of this technology by peak oil groups is a reluctance to embrace new technology in general -- because of a fear that it might go away soon. While those fears may or may not be justified (I would wager they are) we live in the present moment. And in this moment, Twitter is a great technology and a great way to organize. So let's get over it. Oil's going away but we still drive...so let's use the 'now' to prepare for the 'soon'.