Deloreans and Blue Birds

In the early 20th century, a young patent clerk was riding in a street car and noticed a clock tower. Almost simultaneously he took grasp with one of physics greatest mysteries....time. At this point, little was known of time and how it differed from being to being. But the patent clerk's idea went on to set forth the notion that time is relative to where you are and how fast you are moving. In other words, the closer you are to the ground, the slower time is for you (gravity equals degradation in acceleration). From there, Einstein went on to theorize many ground breaking realizations in the natural world. Although many physicians attribute this discovery to the birth of the, ever current, phenomenon of time travel....and indirectly, 1.21 gigawatts.

Today I saw a "clock tower" in the form of Twitter.

As initially stated in the large print disclaimer of this blog, we are homers. To prove this point, today at 1:00 EST I set all work aside and joined the masses of UK basketball fans to follow the recruitment of Alex Poythress. My first stop was the staple website of Kentucky Sports Radio. In true KSR fashion, the site was slow to reach as the blue bloods had congregated and managed to practically disable the site's server. Improvisation was necessary. Google is a great thing, Google is not a great thing when you want pertinent information on the latest news of NCAA recruitment information.

For years I have laughed at the thought of a social networking site that allows for 140 character real-time updates from anyone. Who really cares where you are getting your morning coffee or have much of a crappy day you're having? A vehicle modeled as a small personal blog seemed pretentious and very west coast(how many people do you really know with an account?). But the going was tough today in the news of the nation's 18th best ranked high school basketball player. To the proprietary pages I went.

First, I stumbled upon the anti-KSR UK personality, Marc Maggard. Maggard should actually be commended on his recruitment trail of Poythress. News that I needed further verification, but in the end, was accurate. But from @marcmaggard, I found a link to Nation of Blue which then connected me to CBS basketball writer, Jeff Goodman (@goodmanCBS). Goodman, a very respected individual in the subject, had written of Poythress's expected declaration of the Big Blue. While on Goodman's twitter page, I was referenced to brethren CBS writer, Jeff Borzello (@jeffborzello) who also claimed the same. All this had taken place by 2:15 EST, although Poythress still had yet to make the official announcement.

One last twitter stop was that of @myfoxmemphis who was proclaiming to have a live stream of the event. Although the stream was unable to support that of the Big Blue Nation, I was able to follow the Fox Memphis twitter feed to receive real-time updates. And by 2:40 EST it was officially announced that the University of Kentucky Wildcats had their 3rd commit of the 2012 season (making them the 2nd ranked class, behind Arizona....North Carolina was not reported in the top 2).

If Alex Poythress had committed to UK at that time Einstein had developed his theories of time, or several years ago for that matter, it could have taken days or even weeks for this information to be communicated to those interested. But today, we were able to find out within seconds of the announcement. It's definitely not time travel, but things are definitely moving much faster on the ground then they did 100 years ago.

I formally apologize to the founders and true value users of twitter. Jump on board fellow SHARPsquares....I've reserved my burial plot: @rogerwillobee