Last week I had the pleasure of flying out to Portland for Ignite Portland 3. I had a fabulous time and met some really awesomesauce people including one of my biggest idols Marshall Kirkpatrick, fellow Grand Effect Network member and now team writer for ReadWriteWeb, Frederic of The Last Podcast, and a host of other people that I’ll mention in another post that’s all about the trip to Portland. What I’m going to talk about in this post is what occurred at the after party hosted by Strands at Imbibe.
     

Introductions

At the Imbibe after party I got to talk to a ton of people that I’d only briefly met at IP3. I was twittering and Brightkiting my every step to be honest. I even got stopped and complimented by Gabriel Aldamiz-echevarria, VP of Communications for Strands. After my conversation with Gabe, I headed over to the table that Marshall, Frederic, and a host of others were gathered. I never made it to the table because I ran into Gaia Brown (brilliant woman!) who introduced me to Jake Kuramoto. Gaia started a conversation with someone else and while Jake and I were talking, Marshall came up and introduced me to Craig Schwartz of Toonlet. Do you see where I’m going with this? No? Keep reading then.
    

A Twitter Reaction

It came to a point where I was basically conversation hopping. This was cool because I got to meet a ton of new people and no one had any hard feelings about other people joining the conversation or changing the topic. However, at one point when I stopped talking and sat down, I thought, “Damn, this is Twitter IRL!”.

In turn, this made me wonder if people were taking on the social habits that you would normally exude on Twitter. Twitter is all about conversation hopping in order to make connections with a lot of people in a relatively short span of time. I’d never conversation hopped in such a manner before like I did at Imbibe, except on Twitter. I can’t stress enough how very Twitter-ish the entire thing felt except the conversations were longer but generally interrupted at any given time (Twitter anyone?). Most, if not all of these people are Twitter users. So there has to be at least some kind of connection there, right?
   

What Effects Does Twitter Have On You?

Is it possible that everyone at the Imbibe party was under some sort of Twitter spell or is this a natural Portland get-together reaction? Does Twitter have an effect on the way you converse at parties?