Monthly Archive for August, 2007

We’re back from our annual trek to the land of lobster, chowder and perpetually nervous Sox fans.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about this social media stuff – is it just a toy for us geeks to be eventually discarded for the latest bright shiny, or are we all on to something so big that we can’t yet even wrap our arms around it. Most of all I’ve been thinking about what exactly it is that we are trying to do and what does it all mean. Heady stuff, I admit.

And somewhere between Mystic and Providence, after the fifth or sixth listening of the High School Musical 2 soundtrack (verdict – the kids love it, Mom and Dad find it somewhat lacking the charm of the original) it hit me. It’s all about vectors.

vec·tor (vĕk‘tər) n.

1. Mathematics.
   1. A quantity, such as velocity, completely specified by a magnitude and a direction.
   2. A one-dimensional array.
   3. An element of a vector space.
2. Pathology. An organism, such as a mosquito or tick, that carries disease-causing microorganisms from one host to another.
3. Genetics. A bacteriophage, plasmid, or other agent that transfers genetic material from one cell to another.
4. A force or influence.
5. A course or direction, as of an airplane.

It’s numbers 2, 3 and 4 that interest me. And I do have a point here.

The picture above is of the Shawmut Diner in New Bedford, MA. We discovered it quite by accident last year on the way back home from the Cape. It was noonish, the kids were hungry and Sue plugged “diner” into our handy-dandy GPS and presto, we were enjoying a fine meal. But that’s not where it ends. It turns out Shel Israel spent a good chunk of his youth (probably trying to get a wifi connection) at the very same Shawmut Diner.  A connection made possible by the use of a GPS device, not something we would think of as a social media tool but perhaps as a vector – something that transmits the connection from one person to another or helps one person find a decent meal halfway on the way home.

On a related note, the self-same GPS toy helped us find our annual stop on the way out to the Cape – the Middle of Nowhere Diner in Exeter, RI.  This year, I was feeling goofy and twittered to all who would listen that there we were, in the middle of nowhere. And someone twittered back that they were heading out that way in a few days, was it worth the stop. So here’s this place, a mile off of the beaten path that has one new customer via Twitter.

I’ve been saying for a while that all of this is not about technology, it’s about sharing and connecting like we’ve always done before, but now we have these great new tools to do it. All they do in the end is transmit an idea, a meme perhaps, from one person to the other. Just like a vector.