Des Moines Tweetup

I recently heard about a TweetUp happening in Des Moines tonight.  I'll have to go check it out.
A Tweetup is a meeting of people that use the online social networking/microblogging tool, Twitter.

It's happening tonight at Shorty's bar in downtown Des Moines at 5:30 on Feb. 7th, 2008.  I heard about it through Nathan T. Wright of LavaRow.com. 

The way I heard about the TweetUp is because I track "Des Moines" on Twitter.  You can track any phrase you want on Twitter.  Then whenever someone sends a tweet, or twitter message, with that phrase in the message, you will get a copy of the message.  It's a great technique for finding people (at least Twitter users) who have similar interests as you.  You can track a certain phrase, then when you get a message about that topic from some random person you can start following that person, too.

Because I tracked "des moines", I got Nathan's tweet that said: "Don't forget: The first ever Des Moines TweetUp is tomorrow night (Thursday) @ Shorty's at 5:30pm! Who all is coming?".  Before that moment, I had never heard about the TweetUp (or any TweetUp for that matter).  The tweet said it was sent by nathantwright.  I then replied to Twitter with a "follow nathantwright" message and now I'm a follower of him.  Incidentally, he is now a follower of me, too.

Since I've never been to a TweetUp, I'm not sure what it will be like, but I hope and expect to meet a bunch of people interested in new media and internet technologies.  In a recent blog post, Nathan gave a shout out to Mike Sansone of Converstations, who taught me a bunch about blogging. 

Not actually knowing anyone who's going to this thing, hopefully I'll be able to find the right people.  I expect to just look for all the people text messaging.