Still think Twitter is white noise?

OK, so maybe most of the things posted to Twitter are just random, inane updates in broken English that the average person cares nothing about. I certainly add to that useless pool with most of my tweets and most of the people I follow do the same.

Every once in a while, you do come across a person or two who rise above the white noise on Twitter. These people have some sort of super online persona that contains the ability to turn 140 characters into something not just interesting, but possibly behavior-changing as well.

Meet Kevin Hendricks. I know Kevin through work though we have never actually met in person. Having that gap in personal connection has meant that we connect in other ways whether it be via email, phone or, yes, Twitter.

Although he occasionally breaks into long update streams about NASCAR or hockey and it makes me wish Twitter had a built-in capability to momentarily block specific users, Kevin is an example of what makes Twitter good. So good, in fact, he was able to turn his tiny updates from the past few years into a full-fledged book called Addition by Adoption. Accompanied only by short introductions, the book is entirely constructed out of his Twitter updates. Sound boring? Incredibly it’s not, and what the book reveals is an evolving story of a family in the middle of adopting a child from Ethiopia. The tweets are brief, but they really show how a family grows and adapts through the adoption process and how their worldview gets wrecked as a result. What I like most about the book (besides being an easy read) is that it really captures the spirit of what Donald Miller means when he talks about being able to live a better story.

So what is a little update to Twitter able to do? Well, for starters, it may be the beginning of your story.