Matt Madeiro

Out with it, then: I’ve been converted.

Twitter is awesome. Sure, sure, it’s little more than a glorified list of facebook status updates, but the last twenty-four hours have proven that it’s all of that and a little something I like to call potential.

Take, for example, Don’t Talk to Strangers (and Other Terrible Advice for Travelers) over on Vagabondish.com. I was pretty freaking excited to see the article go live at all, given my respect for the site and vagabonding in general, but the miraculous addition of (re)tweeting has just made me visibly giddy.

Let’s crunch some numbers. As of this time of writing, the article’s been retweeted twenty-five times. Here’s a semi-random selection along with their respective number of Twitter followers (approximated):

1. vagabondish – 5800
2. Lonely Planet (!) – 27,000 (!!)
3. LPUSAstaff – 3900
4. donnadeau – 2800
5. roadup – 1200
6. brianepeters – 3000
7. soultravelers3 – 24,000 (!)
8. TravelIndustry – 5000
9. journeyPod – 17,000
10. travelspauline – 1200

Totaled: 90,900.

First off: holy crap. There’s no point in assuming that every single one of those followers will bother to read the article, but it’s kinda remarkable still to think that at least 90,900 people could take a look at it. Add on to that the readership that Vagabondish pulls in and the other fifteen retweets not counted and there’s only one solution to be drawn: Twitter is awesome.

It gets a surprising amount of hate from techies and antediluvians alike, but anyone floundering about with a career as a freelance writer knows how vital publicity – the kind Twitter provides – can be. Will anything come out of all this? No clue. But it’s pretty exciting stuff for a new kid on the block, and I’m pretty content with leaving it at just that.

Thanks first and foremost to Mike Richard for running the article, and thanks second (and secondmost?) to everyone who read it. And thanks, lastly, to everyone who realized how narcissistic this post is and stuck around regardless.