Yesterday I spoke at Symantec’s Worldwide Sales Conference. The speaking gig itself — a panel on consumer security — was a blast. Byron Achohido (USA Today reporter) moderated. My co-panelists included a representative from the Cato Institute, a Symantec researcher, and a top security architects from Amazon — a person I’d heard of, but had never met. The panel was a lot of fun, and there were few surprises. What was surprising was what I found at the airport today on my way out this morning. Let’s go to the videotape. I arrived at Las Vegas airport around 11AM. After getting through security and to my gate, I began the usual squinty-eyed scan for power outlets — a vulture-like circling motion that I’ve come to recognize in other fellow travelers. Once I found and commandeered a suitable power source, I flipped open the lid of my notebook and looked for a wireless signal. Lo and behold, I discovered that rarest and most delightful of finds: free public wi-fi. When an Anywhere Consumer has a few minutes free and finds something nifty there’s only one thing to do: Twitter the good news, of course! But first, I skimmed the last few days’  worth of tweets using my RSS reader. Then I logged on to the Twitter website directly and sent the following tweet to my ~80 followers: “So Wifi is free at McCarron, which is cool.” One of my former colleagues responded, not more than 5 minutes later, with this: “Free WiFi at McCarran due to strong views McCarren CIO Sam Ingalls.” Fifteen minutes after that a crony at another analyst firm sends me a direct tweet (SMSed to my mobile phone) saying he wished he’d known I was at the Symantec event, because he was there too. To top it all off: I peered closely at my Finder window and noted that Bonjour was telling me that there were at least five other Macs in the immediate vicinity, one of which was named “Book of Power.” What’s remarkable about all this? Nothing, really. Just another day in the life of Ubiquitous Connectivity. But reflecting a bit on the whole thing, I’ve concluded that:

• Free services like Twitter, and McCarren’s wi-fi network — foster novel kinds of spontaneous social interaction.
• The  underlying network protocols — in this case, HTTP (web), SMS (Twitter), Bonjour (local network discovery), 802.11 (wireless) — are less important than the experiences they foster. With apologies to James Carville, it’s the application, stupid!
• Communities like Twitter flourish precisely because of their decentralization, and they illustrate how “circles of friends” provide an important alternative to centrally-managed hierarchies (such as those created by IT departments).

Perhaps the most important lesson is also the most obvious: never mind the technology. Left unchecked, you can waste a lot of time on Twitter.