Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Twitter let me down… sort of.

…Or Facebook comes to the rescue. While trying to put together a presentation, I was looking for a link to a site I half remembered. Since I needed an instant answer, Twitter seemed to be the obvious place to go.

Here's the message I posted on Twitter:
I think I've seen a photo project with people holding hand written notices in front of their faces. Anyone know what I'm talking about?
It didn't exactly draw a flurry of responses, so I reposted a short time later. One response came from gbrown057 who suggested the Bob Dylan sequence from Don't Look Back. This was good, but not what I was looking for. I in turn referred him to the Dylan message generator where you can add your own messages to Bob's boards. Both digitalmaverick and pkkelly half remembered something too but essentially, I drew a blank with Twitter on Friday night.

I decided to have another go on Saturday morning.The Saturday morning set of Twitter contacts might help where Friday night's lot failed but once again, despite repeating the message a couple of times, no answer was forthcoming.

Then on Sunday, Daughter Number 2 asked if the video she sent me was what I was looking for. This caused me a bit of confusion until she said Facebook. I was asking on Twitter but I'd forgotten that my Twitter messages automagically update my Facebook status. And four people had responded there: my sister, my daughter, a friend from university and a chap I've never met but made contact with through Flickr and a shared love of the music of Rush. They were all making suggestions and getting miffed that I wasn't responding.

Silly me. I had my answer… I was just looking in the wrong place. The suggested answers were:
  • Daughter Number 1: All American Rejects: Dirty Little Secret. Interesting and is connected to the PostSecret site. Not what I wanted but an interesting project that I had forgotten about.
  • University friend: Suggested A Vision Of Students Today. Again, it was good, but not quite right. (To coin a catchphrase.)
  • My sister: Sent a link to a song of palindromes called Bob by Weird Al Yankovic Which was interesting since it's a parody of the Bob Dylan song that Gordon had suggested on Twitter.
However, the link that if it's not the one I was thinking of is at least as close as I'm going to get was sent by my fellow Flickr using Rush fan who suggested the Someone Once Told Me group on Flickr.

Lessons learned: two social media tools are better than one and sometimes you find the answer in unexpected places.

Any other lessons I should have learned? (Or any other suggestions?)

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