John Ulan

At the Vintage Lounge, candles fill the room with a warm yellow glow. But then there’s a more noticeable, white glow coming from laptop screens, iPhones, Blackberrys, and a big-screen TV and projector by the entrance.

On Feb. 12, almost 50 Edmontonians joined thousands of others in more than 200 cities worldwide to celebrate the Global Twestival — an event that saw users of the increasingly popular social networking and mini-blogging website Twitter meeting offline to socialize and raise money for “charity: water,” which brings clean drinking water to developing nations.

Twitter users were encouraged to bring laptops and other wi-fi gadgets to the festival so they could “tweet” live — i.e., send updates about what they are doing and thinking in under 140 characters, much like a text message or a Facebook status update — and have the tweets displayed on the big screen along with live tweets from other Twestivals all over the world.

“I saw a lot of new faces,” says 25-year-old Mack Male, whose Twitter username is @mastermaq, and who helped organize the Edmonton Twestival. “I also got the impression that people sort of realized that Edmonton has a pretty wicked Twitter community.”

Edmonton’s Twestival raised $1,000 for charity: water, while neighbour Calgary raised nearly $800. However, both cities’ organizers had hoped Alberta could raise at least $4,000 together to fund a well project in a developing country.

Twitter, which has been online since 2006, has been gaining popularity steadily over the years and has recently been used for various charity projects. “Tweet-a-thons,” “TweetsGivings,” “Trick-or-Tweets,” and tweetup blood drives have all used Twitter to raise money for a cause, but none ever on such a mass scale in a single day, according to Walter Schwabe, CEO of fusedlogic inc., an Edmonton-based social media strategy company.

“There hasn’t necessarily been a single day singled out as the day to tweet… but this one has caught fire,” Schwabe says.

Not all the tweeters in attendance fit the hipster-techie stereotype. John Winslow (@SirThinks), for instance, has been tweeting for less than a month, and eagerly attended Edmonton’s Twestival. Winslow, 45, owns a small trucking company and when he found himself stuck in a snowstorm on the side of the highway in Manitoba just days before Twestival, he simply spent hours sitting and tweeting.

Shauna McConechy, 33, (@Out_Inc) uses Twitter as a marketing tool to help her clients and loved that an event as huge as Twestival came out of online social media. “That so many people can get together.... It’s so hard for people to organize this way,” she says, “and it just shows you the power of online media and how people can connect for a bigger cause, a greater good.”

But tweeting to help charities is not the only thing Twitter’s been gaining popularity for.

News outlets have also begun to utilize Twitter’s instantaneous mass message delivery system. From The New York Times (@nytimes) to Time (@TIME), breaking news is often announced first through a Twitter tweet. Breaking news updates are often sent multiple times throughout the day to any Twitter user who chooses to “follow” the news outlet’s Twitter account.

With the success of Edmonton’s Twestival now behind him, Male looks forward to organizing a casual, not-for-charity meet up with Edmonton Twitter users soon. And if you want to hear about them first, well... info about upcoming Edmonton “tweetups” get posted to @edmontontweetup.

• 851: active users from the Edmonton area, as of Jan. 31
• 48,091: tweets from Edmonton area users
• 2,592: the most tweets from Edmonton in a single day (Jan. 26)
• 45: percentage of tweets posted between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.
• 1,315: tweets containing the tag “#yeg,” which indicates the tweet is Edmonton-related.