Something amazingly fun and humbling happened just a moment ago. I tweeted this:

Frustrated.

It wasn’t much. A solitary little vent, momentary and fleeting. A (dare I say) microexpression of what I was feeling at that particular moment. One single solitary word, tossed out into the Twitter ether. And in a world that moves by at dozens (hundreds?) of tweets per second, that’s precisely the kind of thing that could go completely unnoticed.

But it didn’t. Within seconds, I received 24 (yes, 24, on a Friday night no less) replies from people asking what the matter was. I got another half dozen direct messages, some of which were from people I’d barely corresponded with but whose names and little 1″ faces I’d come to recognize. Everyone expressing concern and a desire to help.

Seriously?

This isn’t a statement of some obscure notion of popularity. It’s about something far more fundamental than that, and the reason that I am intensely passionate about how piles of plastic and wires and silicon can connect people on a truly human level. It’s the simplicity of a personal connection, and how much it resonates when someone cares enough to reach out.

I felt better almost instantly. Some people made me laugh, some just put a smile on my face. But in every case, I realized that for all the things that these people could be doing or saying in those few moments, they took the time to reach out to me.

Next time someone wants to know why I bother with something like my blog, or Facebook, or Twitter, I’m going to tell them that my momentary frustration was powerfully and immediately dispelled by a couple of handfuls of friendly voices. Voices that cared enough to take two seconds, reach across the void, and connect. Thanks, Twitter friends.

Frivolous, my foot.