When did I begin to follow, or be followed by, Ramanujam on Twitter?  I have been sharing ideas and information through 140-character Twitter updates for less than a year; he has been doing the same for over two years.  Regardless of when or how we first made contact, I have treasured Ramanujam’s Twitter updates - his tweets - for the diversity of his knowledge, his IT expertise, and his straightforward humanity.

When Handshake 2.0 had its one-year anniversary party, I invited three people I follow on Twitter whom I had never met.  I sent Ramanujam a Twitter "Direct Message," a DM, to invite him.  He sent me a tweet back:  “Thanks for the invite.  I’m in India right now.”

A tweet from India.

I have read Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat - which opens with a description of the information technology industry in India.  I have seen seen Slumdog Millionaire and The Namesake and probably had my world view altered forever by seeing the film Gandhi in the early 80s.  I have heard from my father of his travels to India.  In all of those cases, I was an observer or listener.

Ramanujam’s tweet to me was a real-time, person-to-person connection.  I was “in” India.

When Gary Cope (@garycope) organized a Blacksburg Tweetup - a “tweetup” is an area meeting of Twitter users - I was thrilled to receive a reply tweet from Ramanujam that he would be there and I would finally meet him in person.

When I read Devin Coldewey's post on TechCrunch about why he doesn’t use Twitter, I felt sad for him.  Upon first shaking hands, Ramanujam and acknowledged we would never have met if not for Twitter.  We are separated by decades, cultures, industries.  And we talked and laughed and broke bread together.

The world isn’t flat.  It’s miraculous.

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Ramanujam honored me by allowing me to video him.  A computer science graduate student at Virginia Tech, he plans to be an entrepreneur.  That we definitely have in common.