360DigitalInfluence

I have a confession.

When I have a bad day, I turn not to my boyfriend or my family, but to Ruth Bourdain. I laugh. I smile. I feel better about life. And I engage. Frankly, I engage much more than I ever would with any of my in real-life Twitter friends, let alone the brands I follow.

What is it about my dear (totally fake) friend Ruth B that captures my heart, so much more than (the totally real) @RuthReichl or @NoReservations? Is it those dark locks above his/her avatar’s mysterious eyes? Our shared love of offal? Or just his/her biting wit? I’m thinking the latter. And @RuthBourdain is just one of a number of fake Twitter personae with sizable followings: @FakeAPStylebook has over 200,000 followers, while the original @APStylebook only has  72,000. Why is the fake beating the real?

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This past winter was one the snowiest on record in the Lake Tahoe region of California, which was great for skiing but horrible for keeping cars on the road. I skied 28 days in a four months with a full time job in San Francisco — basically, every Friday night I was driving up to Tahoe in a blizzard.  And every Friday night I was glued to Google Buzz for real time updates about accidents and road closures — the results came in about a half hour to an hour before California Highways did. I also was checking for backroads ways around these road closures. Google Buzz saved anywhere from 2 to 12 hours of time each weekend; that’s a lot of precious hours on the snow when you add that up across a ski season.

Each time I used the mobile app portion of Google Buzz on Google Maps, I shared an experience with people normally separated by their cars. Google Buzz, to be just a bit sentimental, brought us together. And we weren’t talking about what we ate for lunch or some random Internet meme but about something actually — sorry Triffle — useful.

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