Josh Shear

I rang in 2010 with a great crowd of people: Mike, Frank, Nicole, Mel, Joe, Geoff and Rochelle.

Every one of those names up there is linked to a Twitter account. I met all of those people thanks to Twitter (either connecting on Twitter or having them connected to someone I had connected to on Twitter), and all of them in 2009. I know there are still nay-sayers – people who think that Twitter is just a bunch of nerds chatting online who couldn't hold a conversation in real life so they're hiding behind a utility – but as I mentioned last month, Twitter leads to more in-person interaction, not less.

I'm not the only one who made this observation about our new year's eve gathering.

I know the other question on your mind is: Were we talking or tweeting all night? I just went through all of our Twitter streams. Frank tweeted 3 times while we were out; one of those was a photo from our night out. Rochelle tweeted once; it was a photo of our night out. I posted once; it was a scheduled happy new year tweet I had created two days prior.

So, we were either talking to each other, or we were standing around in awkward silence. And there was no awkward silence.