Saturday Tweetup
January 11, 2010
Saturday we met with our Twitter friends at one of our favorite restaurants – Al Baghdadi on Al Muteena Street. The very first time Daddybird and I ate at this restaurant, my purse was stolen. You can read the detailed account of that experience here.
Anyway, back to the Tweetup. There were 26 people, according to my count, not all pictured here. They are a marvelous group of people from a wide range of countries, ages, professions, etc. 
Rami showed up late, but that’s the beauty of a tweetup. People come and go as they please or their schedule allows.
Now a word about Twitter. It seems that my friends and acquaintances back home haven’t figured out what to do with Twitter. They prefer Facebook. For me, Facebook is fine for keeping in touch with people you met and made friends with “in the flesh.” I have never made a new friend through Facebook. For me, the beauty of Twitter is making new friends. We are having an atypical expat experience because of this. We would never have met these people through “normal channels.” I once described Twitter as: “like being in a room full of people who are all talking, but you can hear and understand what everyone is saying and join or ignore any conversation.” This got “retweeted” a few times, so there may be some truth in it. The people (mostly stupid journalists) who say they aren’t interested in Twitter because they don’t care what other people had for lunch, really don’t comprehend what is happening in Twitter. There was a study that randomly sampled tweets and determined that 40% is “pointless babble.” This study was deeply flawed, because you can’t pull tweets out of context without turning them into pointless babble. Twitter is a conversation.
Why did I take a picture of this bystander who was not part of our group? Because he’s wearing a leather coat over his kandura BECAUSE IT’S SO COLD! The low that night was 63F. Since the people back home are complaining about rain, wind and sometimes snow, the thought that people think Dubai is cold is amusing to me.
Living the Travel Channel 
Now I know what I missed, unfortunately I was on an airplane heading back to UAE. having spent and enjoyed almost 3 weeks at temperatures ranging from -5F to 30F I find 63F almost a heat wave.
you are absolutely right about the value of Twitter and the fact that Facebook is all about people we already know. Twitter is the adventure of meeting interesting people.
ah missed this one! 😦
The food looks great!
The food *is* great! 🙂
That’s the beauty of twitter!
I have made some new friends via FB..but only cuz they were connected to old ones I had in the distant past. Far distant! Also, is twittering as popular in the states?