Micro-blogging (Twitter) & Footbag

I’ve been trying to find the time post about Twitter for the past year, but things just keep coming up. Finally, some others have taken the initiative, and have been talking about it. David Wilder started this modified thread. Evan Lovely responded there, illuminating his success in using it to organize his local scene. He’s since since re-published this explanation as a separate blog post on the Missoula Footbag website, entitled: How I use Twitter for Organizing Footbag.

Evan explains in good detail the process that you can go through with the people in your local scene that will help them keep notified of sessions in a decentralized way.

Beyond this local organizing use, I see Twitter (or another Twitter-like “microblogging” platform) being useful in all sorts of ways that could be the most directly beneficial thing to hit the footbag community since the Internet. Mob-casting tournaments would give people not in attendance real-time results. This could easily be adapted (via the API and, for example, #ifpa-wfc09 tags) as a crowd-sourced poll; in the future, maybe those results will matter more than the panel of official judges. “Yeah, the judges gave it to Vasek, but Allan won the twitter-vote by a landslide.” All anyone would need would be a cell phone (not even a fancy one) and an account, and they could vote.

There are also all sorts of other promotional ideas it could be used for: walk the streets before the event telling people to “follow ifpa” for official tournament notifications.

I could also see this concept completely overtaking the “Footblog” concept, as made popular on Modified. Having a service to track your game progress and follow that of others is a powerful idea. Why wait until you get in front of a computer to tell people you just hit nemesis for the first time? Text it in on the spot! Get props in real-time.

As Evan wrote:

In conclusion, Twitter seemed like dumbest thing I’d ever heard about (think back to the first time someone tried to describe Twitter to you), but one of the coolest things I use. It took a little (ok, a lot) of getting used to, but I get it now, and I think that it is an amazing tool.

Twitter Accounts:

• The Missoula Footbag Alliance: @FootbagAlliance

My personal Twitter account: @EvanL

• My geeky web designy, Mac lovin’ Twitter account: @freeStyle_Media

Freedom Footbags has been on Twitter for some time now, though I’ve yet to push Daryl and Sunny into using it, and I’ve not had a chance to integrate it into the site … yet. Follow us: http://twitter.com/freedomfootbags