My leisurely Saturday morning browse through the overnight tweets on Twitter brought to my attention the embryonic formation of a new movement — or group, or collective, or however you wish to describe it — called the United Nation of Twitter. My tweeting life hasn’t been quite the same since. What’s it all about?

When I saw some of @rockingjude‘s tweets talking about creating a “United Nations” of Twitter, I was quite taken with the idea, nebulous though it was. Hands across the water, and all that. Rockingjude has a web site called Project World Awareness, which gave her the idea. The site’s principles, the Our Mission page explains, are based upon Liberty, Integrity, Fraternity and Equality or LIFE. Though these principles may clash on occasion, Rockingjude and her collaborators believe that they provide the foundation upon which growing, free and changing societies, communities and individuals can better understand themselves and one another.

Well, I can go for that, so I decided to help out a bit by creating a Google Map (image above — click for larger version) where followers of the subject — denoted in tweets by the inclusion of a hashtag: #un — could leave a place-marker showing where they live. After a few teething problems setting the map to be an open collaboration so that anyone could add their own markers, we started tweeting about it. During Saturday it gathered about a dozen markers. By the evening (GMT), there were about forty. On Sunday morning it had climbed to around sixty. At this time of writing, there are eighty-five.

I used snipurl to shorten the link to the map to make it easier to put into tweets (with their 140-character limit, short URLs are pretty much essential these days).

Add Your Place On The Map

The short link is: sn.im/twit-un

The long link is: maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=101984351091691596992.000463f645ce0a75daa36&ll=51.328252,-2.865372&spn=117.606895,316.40625&t=h&z=2

(You can see why short links services like snipurl are useful in Twitter and other status update services!)

When you get there, you need to either create a Google account before you can add your place marker, or log in to your existing Google account. Then just follow the instructions.

Follow the Discussions

Using the hashtag system, a useful way to quickly find all tweets referring to the UNofT and see them updated in real time is offered by tweetgrid.com — that’s twIRC.

The short link for monitoring the #un hashtag in twIRC is: sn.im/twit-irc

The long link is: tweetgrid.com/irc?r=rtt&q=%23un

Don’t ask me how twIRC works — @rockingjude tweeted about it first, so I added it to the mix of links we’re building.

Fine — But What’s It All About?

Well, here’s the thing: personally, right now, I don’t really know — it’s Rockingjude’s idea, not mine, remember, I’m just the map-maker — but I can see that its potential could be huge. It’s good to have an emerging group of tweeps chatting together amongst the white noise of Twitter, seeking ways to change the world into a better place. I don’t know how, or whether, this is achievable, but we won’t know unless we try. Does this sound trite? A bit New Age? Maybe. But I know this: I’m fed up with the world being run the way it is — with politicians straining the limits of credulity with their plans to “save the world” while the bankers continue to enslave us all with their black holes of debt. How do they want us to get out of the current financial crisis? By taking on even more debt! It’s madness.

There needs to be another way, or we’re all lost. And so are our children and grandchildren, who’ll be even more enslaved than we are as the bankers bleed them dry.

That’s just one example of the things, the attitudes, that need to change. There are so many more. True, you can’t say much in 140 characters, but the restriction actually helps to focus the mind — and the cumulative effect of tweeting about these things might bring about a paradigm shift, a cultural change, in those that stick with it.

One shift that’s already taken place is that the name has changed from the United Nations of Twitter to the United NATION — singular — of Twitter. It helps to reflect the fact that, on the Internet, there are no boundaries. Historical disputes over territory has been responsible for some of mankind’s worst excesses. We’re not having it. We need to aspire to be a one-world nation, thinking globally while acting locally.

At the very least, Twitter provides a place where we can say that we’re as mad as hell and we’re not gonna take it any more. Even if we’re the only ones listening. It’s good to tweet.

So come and join @rockingjude and me in the United Nation of Twitter. See if, together, we can make a difference.

This post reflects my own personal thoughts on the United Nation of Twitter and is not intended to represent @rockingjude’s — or anyone else’s — thoughts on the subject.

Tags: Google, Twitter, Web 2.0

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 1st, 2009 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.