Then my body failed after an accident and gone was my adult conversation time at work or out in the real world. There were times I couldn’t get off the lounge or out of bed and started to go a bit stir crazy.
So I logged in and slowly built a community for myself. Mates, rocking local mums (dubbed the riotmums), actors I loved, authors whose books I devoured, news sites. As I got to know new tweeps (tweeting people), they introduced me to more and the isolation caused by my disability lifted slightly.
For many Twitter is a marketing tool, for others a place to have quick chats. The flow of the tweet conversations is quick, forced along by the 140 character limit so people using this platform often seem quicker, funnier than those on Facebook because the platform forces them to use words sparingly.
For me Twitter is a view on the outside world, access to information, views and conversation that I couldn’t get alone in the house. What I didn’t expect to find was a real life community.
One of the Sydney tweeps I followed on the recommendation of a riotmum had been tweeting about her almost-six-months quest to find a rental in Newcastle. How the search was getting her down and she was ready to give up.
So I jumped onto the tweet account I had set up with some school mums to spread community news and started hassling real estate agents and spreading the word. @Mayfield2304 spread the word with the challenge to see what the power of the Newcastle tweet community could achieve for someone I only knew as a person who typed tweets from down the other end of the F3, or on the Shitkansen (Syd-Newie train).
A week or so later came the tweet we’d been waiting, she’d signed a lease!
Maybe the tweet campaign had nothing to do with it, but it opened a conversation and linked a lot of Newcastle tweeps together and maybe it gave this tweep the motivation to keep looking.
In the strangest twist my tweet world full of imaginary friends collided with my real world. This particular tweep had found a place in my suburb so I offered up favourite cafe info. Then it just got weird. She was really close to the cafe, around the corner, so I assumed in the street around the corner.
No, it wasn’t around the corner, it was my street, in fact next door!
Oh no, now I felt like a completely internet stalker!
This tweep and her family are wonderful people. They are exactly what good neighbours should be and I refuse to ever start a tweet campaign to find her another house because I don’t want them to move – ever.
This post is part of series of guest blogs around the theme "When Tweeps Are Your Peeps", started following the #NewyTwistmas party in the Hunter region. Keep following over the coming weeks for more.
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