Oftentimes, people ask me why I like Twitter. And on the surface, they may have a point. All you can do with Twitter is post 140 character messages. How can that possibly be better than something like Facebook? There are so many more things you can post to Facebook. And there’s no silly 140 character limit.

What first attracted me to Twitter was that, because it had that limit, it prevents you from writing long tomes. If you have a thought that you think others might find interesting, you tweet it, and it’s done. You know you can’t expand on it, so you don’t worry about it. This is why Twitter is called “microblogging”.

But there’s another nice thing about Twitter. It brings you closer to those you admire. If a celebrity you like is on Twitter, you can follow them and be connected in some way to what’s happening in their life. You can also send them an @reply and have a chance (ranging from “slim” to “real”) that they’ll see it, or even reply. Now, major celebrities (who may have more than a million followers), may get hundreds of replies to every tweet. So they’ll probably not see it (but everyone uses Twitter differently; see @BrentSpiner, who uses Twitter mostly to engage his fans in (often funny) dialog). But lesser known ones quite possibly may see it and even @reply to you. And that is way cool.

As an example, take Robert Lee, (@voicework on Twitter). He’s the narrator for Mythbusters (and to date, the only person to ever say, “Ahh, fresh underwear for Mr. Savage” on national television). I like everything about Mythbusters, so follow on Twitter everyone connected to the show. And knowing that voice work is lonely work (insofar as they typically just get their lines and record them and don’t necessary interact with the others on the show), I was curious if Robert had ever been to M5 Industries (where Mythbusters is filmed). So last night I asked

http://twitter.com/mlv/status/9127163372

him, and this morning saw a reply from him.

http://twitter.com/voicework/status/9128476923

That interaction took probably less than a minute for both of us and didn’t involve anyone else.

Now, let’s look at how that interaction would have worked in the BT (Before Twitter) era. I would first have had to find out how to contact him. I would probably have had to send him mail (either snail or e) care of Discovery channel. Let’s say it was via snail mail. I write a letter, find the address of Discovery Channel (DC), address and stamp it, and take it to my nearest mailbox (few blocks from my house). Some fan mail handler at DC gets it, opens it, and first thinks “who’s Robert Lee?”. Let’s say he figures it out so then looks up the address of Robert Lee’s agent and forwards it to him. Robert Lee’s agent then gets the letter and maybe calls Robert Lee, reading it to him, and maybe Robert Lee answers, so maybe the agent writes a response and puts it in the self addressed stamped envelope I provided). So in the BT world, it would involve at least two more people and more likely than not would not have happened.

Does this work for all celebrities? Certainly not. Robert Lee only has a couple thousand followers and rarely more than 1-2 @replies a day. But if you look at Adam Savage (@donttrythis) you’ll see he replies to his fans, too. That just never happened BT.