This is the true story of some sad grown ups or 10 year old girls – you be the judge . The conference in San Francisco was over and a couple of Aussie friends and were relaxing in ‘Little France’ (it’s barely 2 side streets) finishing off some palatable French red wine and pate’ when I chirped up “isn’t the Twitter headquarters a couple of blocks away?”
Well, after a few bottles of red, anything seemed possible, so 5 minutes later we found ourselves following the blue Google maps dot to a nondescript looking 6 storey building in the SOMA (South of Market Street) district, where some household name ebusinesses reside. To be honest the beige coloured 1970s office building looked more like a tax office than the throbbing heart of social mediasville, but we thought “what the hey” and marched inside, half expecting to be turfed out 10 seconds later. Turning briefly to the security guards in the lobby we confidently announced “Twitter?” as if we were rushing to an important meeting. “Sixth floor” they replied pointing to the lift lobby.
‘Hey we made it to the lift lobby’ we giggled, ‘no way this lift is allowing us up to the 6th floor, you probably need a smart card or something’. But, on pushing ‘6’ we duly rose up and before we could express our surprise we were standing in the lobby walking to the Twitter reception desk. Now, no doubt, this scene plays itself out many times a day, so we thought we better own up and see if it was OK if we could hang out. The receptionist (her card called her ‘Communication Officer’) smiled and said it was fine. She even gave us a password for free WIFI. So for the next hour we photographed ourselves, tweeted, foursquared and facebooked from Twitter HQ, used the facilities, sat in all the seats, read the framed newspaper and magazine article covers and watched the tooing and froing of Gen Y computer whizzes as they moved between offices (they needed smart cards for access here of course).
Yes, a sad middle aged wannabee story – but have you ever been to Twitter HQ? No, I didn’t think so 🙂
[…] I remember being very sceptical about Twitter when I first came across it in 2008, but being encouraged to give it a go, and then persist with it, it slowly became my favourite (and most useful) of all the social media. I can’t really imagine life without it now. { As some of you may know, I once walked inside the Twitter HQ in San Francisco.} […]