SQLSaturday brought to you by foursquare

A few months ago, I had the pleasure and honor to help organize the first SQLSaturday in Chicagoland with Wendy (blog | twittter)  and Ted (blog | twitter).  Let me first say that I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Obviously there are things we could of done better and some things we just simply weren’t aware of, but it was without a doubt the best SQLSaturday I have ever been to (full disclosure: it is the only SQLSaturday I have ever been to ).

However one of things I thought was interesting about it was that it never would have happened if not for foursquare and twitter.

I cannot get to the posts now, but sometime last October I had posted via foursquare last I was at Magenic in Lombard, IL when Wendy saw that it was only a mile away from her work in Lombard.  Within a week, we met for lunch.  That is the luncheon where Wendy and I first shook hands and said let’s do a SQLSaturday.  Thank you twitter and foursquare.

How many methods can we use?

Just the other day I was chatting on IM with Ted.  He asked me for something, however we were off IM by the time I got it, so I called and left him a voicemail.  Evidently, he was at dinner so he texted me back and then I Twitter DM’d him to which he called and left a voice mail for me.  What is cool about that is each of us communicated with whatever was easiest at the time and the conversation context was not lost.

More <> Better

Of course more communication methods do not in any way, mean more efficient or even better communication.  In fact, it is probably the opposite.  Conversations held 140 characters at a time do not have much depth.  Plus we all have been in the situation of being 10 characters over and trying to figure out what characters we can remove yet still get the meaning across.

This has the similar effect of the newspaper headline.  It is catchy and sells but the depth is not the best.  In addition, studies shows that the majority of communication is non-verbal, or in the context of this blog post: non-text.  Not everything can be boiled down to the 140-character sound bite.

Lonely and complicated

It is unbelievable that we live with 6 billion other people on the planet but one of the largest problems is loneliness.  I mean it is documented about our society regarding loneliness and interaction:

When Americans say “Hi, how are you?”, they are only expecting a “Fine,” or a “Fine, thank you” or a “Good” in response.  It is not usually an invitation to a lengthy conversation.

And truth be known, I’m as guilty as the next person of doing that,

There are some things that are inherently complex and therefore need a deeper level of discussion.  Having a real relationship is one of them.  And you know what?  That is ok.