Vanessa Fox. Nude.

Gnomedex. Where you can be geeky without confused stares and the need to explain what the saying on your shirt means. Or why you would wear a shirt with a geeky saying in the first place. Where no one gives you an evil glare for typing on your phone while having an in-person conversation. Where it’s perfectly reasonable to twitter and IM at the same time with the person sitting directly next to you (or maybe that was just me and Natala). And everyone understands the joy of laptop stickers.

No, the confused stares are not the ones you get in a normal crowd. Instead they are that you have a PC rather than a Mac and a Windows Mobile device rather than an iPhone. But it’s considered reasonable to refer the doubters to your blog posts on the matter.

And that is, of course, the biggest draw of Gnomedex. That you can jump into conversations with people you’ve never met before and dive in deep right away. You start from a place of shared understanding. You’re passionate about the same things. You speak the same language. So even though you’ve never met in person before, you don’t think twice about inviting them to your house for poker.

As many others have commented, everyone was using Twitter and Facebook. And we’re not the 20 year olds you read about always facebooking instead of emailing. (In fact, I’m sure most of us were also on constant email, if only because unlike the 20 year olds, we had to keep up with what was going on at the office, which as of yet, is mostly not available through the Facebook APIs.)

I was trying to figure out what it is about these technologies that have pulled us in. I have noticed that I’ve been text messaging a lot in the last year or so too, which is another thing I thought only the young whippersnappers did. Thirty five is looming over me like a dark, lumbering storm cloud — I mean joyous springboard of life — so I can’t really claim whipper snapperness anymore. And yet.

Sometimes new technologies just work well for what we need. We could have said we didn’t need the telegraph when we could just write a letter. And once we had the telephone, why slow things down by using email? (Don’t you remember the days of the “do we need email” debates?) And with the richness of email, who needs IM? Truth is, they each serve a different purpose (particularly that handy telegraph service).

I can Twitter a short thought when I just don’t have time for a full blog post. And Facebook is not only working really well as a contact management system (I am deeply disorganized), but is just makes things easy for keeping track of people and events. (It’s clearly FAR from perfect, like so far I can’t even see where the road to perfect would start from where Facebook is, but it’s still useful.) I met lots of great people at Gnomedex and collected lots of business cards, but it’s much easier to just add those people on Facebook than to hope I keep those cards around and can find them when I need them.

Deb Schultz gave a great talk about relationship weaving via online social tools at Gnomedex as part of the fantastic Ignite Seattle session (speaking of useful organization, I grabbed that link from Facebook) about how we use technology to stay in touch. The point of her talk was that the technology may change, but we as humans don’t. Technology has definitely helped me stay in touch with old friends and make new ones (in ways beyond the glowing blue light of the monitor).

Which brings me back to where I started. We geeks may like to spend a lot of time in front of that glow, but it’s also great to see each other in person as we Twitter. How else would our fellow geeks get to read our t-shirts?