Where does the time go?

OK. I’ve been MIA. Blame it on the weddings: our daughter (photo) and our niece. And exhaustion. Not a good excuse, but a valid reason. Hi! I’m back.

Of course, these were great occasions for offline social networking. Meanwhile, the legal online space has been exploding with conversations about one of my favorite social networking subjects, Twitter.

Robert J. Ambrogi’s article sort of kicked it off for me. Not that Bob’s technology shy…he’s a big proponent, but his test run on Twitter was undertaken to see if it held possibilities. And he found it did, ergo his piece on law.com.

Then, Carolyn Elefant in the Legal Blog Watch pointed out the slowdown in blog commenting overall. Her take was that it may be tracable to the increase in Twitter activity, both from the increasing user base among lawyers and legal observers and the ease that Twitter provides to have the conversations that used to be confined to blogs, something Scott Greenfield covered in Simple Justice.

Finally, the LegalTech conference last week found itself awash in tweets and Twitter, so much so that the offline conversation turned from ediscovery, the stated topic of the sessions, to online social media. John Bringardner covered it for Legal Blog Watch.

Last summer, Twittter had a user base in the hundreds of thousands. This month, it crossed the six million user line. Clearly, there is a tremendous curiosity about the functionality of the micro-blogging space, and the absence of a cost of entry lets anyone in without regard to quality. The development of companion applications like Tweetdeck keep driving the user base to new functionalities. For the legal world, Kevin O’Keefe’s LexTweet is an aggregator of a specific user content stream. The focusing of Twitter content through these application spaces will further the conversations in this medium.

The only worry I have now? Where do we find the time to converse?