One of my first posts was on the topic of ‘Where We Are Available’. It focused on the ‘geographic’ side of flexibility and the tools needed to bring people together for collaborating in an efficient manner. In the little over a year since that post, the principles of ‘where we are available’ have risen in prominence across a number of social media.

The Twitter ‘status update’ is one of the most popular uses for Twitter.  Updates on where people are delivered with the immediacy of the Twitter medium entails a chance for connected (‘following’, ‘friends’) individuals to connect geographically.  What it lacks in integration (with standard collaboration and calendaring like Outlook and Exchange) it gains in immediacy and convenience.  People like Hugh MacLeod are actively exploiting which quality to prompt impromptu real-world connections and face-to-face meetings.  One of the big criticisms of distributed working is that one loses out on the ‘serendipity’ of people bumping into each other in the hallway or at the water cooler.  But exploiting Twitter in this fashion demonstrates how new tools can actually expand ones potential for serendipity and actively foster it in distributed working mode.