At the recent South By Southwest ’09 Interactive happening, a panelist made a Twitter analogy I thought apt. While showing a slide of Seurat’s masterpiece, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, he said Twitter is like a pointillist painting; alone, each dab of paint is not that important, but together, they can really add up to something special. I nodded along with the other Twitter fanatics in the room, many of whom were tweeting that line out to their followers.

A couple nights ago, I read a tweet—one tweet—that smashed the pointillist metaphor to bits. It was a tweet from a father, regarding his son who had a respiratory infection. He asked his followers to pray, because they didn’t think he was going to make it.

The immediacy of it took my breath away. How old was the boy? Had he been sick long? How can someone die from a respiratory infection? I visited the guy’s twitter site, thinking there would be multiple tweets about a lengthy illness, and again I was shocked. Up until that final tweet, there were everyday tweets about everyday things: playing in the backyard with his two sons, a birthday party, work and school, and then, out of the blue, this 10 year old kid might not make it.
I don’t consider myself religious in the traditional sense, but I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t thinking about some version of the “power of community prayer” at that moment. The Twitterverse came alive with hope, promise of prayers and outpourings of communal grief. It was not to be. I found out this morning the boy passed away some time last night.

For those who ridicule twitter as a sea of banality, unaware of what it really is or can be, here was a small window into a normal family’s life that was terribly shattered, a plea to the familiar and to strangers, an outpouring of support, and after the death, a community expressing sympathy. All in 140 characters or less. If you’ve not examined Twitter, join the 7+ million who have. You’ll find it so much more than the now clichéd, “that’s where people tell you what they ate for breakfast.”