The other night was quite windy in here Santa Monica. It was 4am and I was wide awake and totally spooked.  I randomly posted how I was feeling to Twitter and noticed shortly thereafter that other west-siders were awake and acknowledging that they felt the same way.

This exchange comforted me somehow. It made me feel less neurotic about being freaked out by something so simple as wind.

It’s scary to think that everything I post is on record somewhere, but to participate I realize – like in a real world relationship – that it helps to open up.

I noticed that after posting more opinionated tweets or describing certain situations that my number of followers dramatically increased.  Offering up stuff I was working on, like  DJ mixes, helped too.

Make the experience personal and memorable and people will follow.

Just like the real world, the Twitterverse is full of amazing individuals who love to share their creations, thoughts and opinions.

Get to know your tweeples. Send them messages, read their blogs. You’ll become flattered by the types of people who follow you, and become inspired to offer more.  It makes participation more meaningful than communicating aimlessly in an anonymous online world.

A few weeks ago I had an interesting conversation amongst friends in the dark corner of a Chinatown Bar.

Of all things one could discuss on a Saturday night at 1a.m. we got to chatting about, well, chatting. Specifically, on voicemail, e-mail, IM, SMS, FB and Twitter.

Leave it to the nerds.

As biggest nerd ever, I thought more about this over the course of the next few days.

While the aforementioned mediums make it easier to communicate, while we participate we’re sacrificing the human experience and encouraging alienation from others.

My friends know that I generally dislike voicemail. It’s rare that I leave them and admittedly barely listen to them.

They’re like an awkwardly scripted one-way time capsule from the past. Why not leave the same message in real time – circa now?

In 1995 I signed up for my first email address. In the interest of self-disclosure for the sake of this story I (gulp) became semi-addicted to AOL chat rooms.

This was back in the day when we were all on dial-up – and paid for internet by the hour.

Like most people, I was beyond intrigued with the notion of chatting in real time with anyone from anywhere in the world. For a angst-ridden teenage girl growing up in the midwestern suburbs it was my portal.

Ironically enough, I quickly became friends with someone who happened to live nearby. We immediately bonded over our mutual obsession of music, media, the arts, and local underground parties (ok fine, “raves”).

There were no rules. We’d chat anytime of day or night when both of us happened to be online. There was no limit to the range of topics we’d discuss.

Over time, our lives became closer and he felt like a real friend.

One year we briefly met in person by total accident. We chatted for a few awkward moments until my friend pulled me away. “Who is that guy?” She asked.

She didn’t even have an e-mail address at that point so maybe she wouldn’t understand…or would she?  I tried to explain.

“Ok, anyway…”, she replied. “Wanna get some frozen yogurt?”

When I moved away to college our friendship continued.

He’d give me feedback on various art projects and tips for acclimating  to a newly vegan diet. I’d give him girl advice and let him know what I thought of his latest remix. We’d crack jokes, share URLs and pontificate the meaning of life years later as I procrastinated writing those 30 page papers in grad school.

He moved to Los Angeles, I moved to Boston.

We became friends on MySpace, then Friendster, then Facebook.

I moved to Los Angeles.

We slowly became friends In Real Life. Bonded by our mutual common interests, I’ve found myself on more than one occasion chatting with him poolside at the Roosevelt Hotel or under the skylights at LA hotspot Bardot.

My male companions give him the hairy eye wondering who the dude is I’m chatting conspiratorially alongside.

15 years later, we still communicate on IM. Now, we also communicate via SMS and e-mail too.

And sometimes, we’ll even drop the other a Voicemail.

Are our lives intertwined? Somewhat.

Will we ever connect on a deep and meaningful level? Probably not.

As part of different spheres, our interests overlap on a social level only.

Yet for someone I’ve hung out with for maybe an hour total in person, he probably knows more about me than anyone.

Communicating on IM can build a form of friendship. We’re missing the part that hanging in person brings – the adventures, atmosphere, lingering conversations, observations, body language. These things bring meaning to a surface-level friendship and make it come alive.

Can a real friendship be fostered online then, when all we have is type?

Leave your comments by clicking on “comments” at the top of this post.

Boxee is an open source media center that allows you to enjoy your movies, tv shows, music and photos in one place and pull more streaming content from the web. You can recommend items to friends – and see what your friends have recently watched or what they recommend.

I installed Boxee on my Macbook Pro running Leopard OSX 10.5.6.  Boxee automatically discovered the music, movies, tv shows, and pictures on my hard drive, allowing me to navigate by format of choice.

One of the great simple features about Boxee is that I have the option to go online within each category seamlessly. For example, under “movies” I can access my Netflix account and stream movies from my instant queue. Under “music” I can log in to my Last.fm account and stream a station. Also cool is the ability to discover content from CNN, CBS, Comedy Central, Hulu, etc under “television”.

I can set up RSS feeds to add niche-specific shows that I prefer. This is where it gets interesting.  Should I feed in a TED video podcast? How about CNN breaking news clips – or a torrent of Gossip Girl?

Extremely intuitive, sleek design. Awesome. Now how do I get this from my mac to my television?

For picture I connected my laptop to a Samsung 36″ HDTV using a DVI-D to HDMI adapter. For audio I used a basic Y Cable running from the laptop’s digital output to  Onyko 5.1 Surround. Still looks sleek. In settings I can check real-time details to monitor how close I’m getting to 60 Hz.

Pretty cool. Now how can I control Boxee remotely to make the experience akin to watching television?

I discovered that the Boxee remote app is due any day. In the meantime, found an app called AirMote and installed it on my iTouch running 2.2 software.

All of this sounds fine and dandy. But, how does Boxee handle streaming?  I can have access to all the content in the world but if the streaming quality is bad – buffering does not a good movie watching experience make.

Speakeasy.net tells me that I’m clocking in at a 1.5MB pull. Not bad. I watched a few trailers from the apple site and it looked great. I then went to Hulu to catch the latest episode of 30 Rock. Halfway through I almost forgot that I was watching over the internet. The stream was crisp and there was no buffering at all. The quality was about the same as watching television but higher bandwidth paired with more HD offerings could easily solve that. Streaming a movie from my Netflix instant-queue was different. It didn’t buffer but the video occasionally dropped a few frames.

I skated over to the music category and streamed music from my library then visited Last.fm. Would love to pull in music from other sources such as Pandora or Slacker, too.

Boxee allows me to friend other users and see what they’re watching. I can recommend programs to my friends and view items recommended to me on the Boxee homepage. At friendfeed, Twitter, and Tumblr I can share my recommendations, what I’m watching, and what I’m listening to.

I like having all of my digital media in one place. It’s fun albeit a little strange to lifestream what I’m watching.  However I can’t multi-task and surf around on my computer while I watch. Time to save up for a Mac Mini! Then I can network all of my media somehow…. Which makes me wonder how I would go about backing it all up…ahh there’s always something.

Anyway, 2 thumbs up for Boxee.

note: thanks to Andy Sternberg for the Alpha version invite.

I’m gonna take the jump and upgrade to WP 2.7 dubbed “Coltrane”. It seems to be pretty stable and includes a bunch of cool new features. Wish me luck…