Not long ago, I wrote about why I’m not playing the #FollowFriday Twitter meme anymore, and I still stand by my sentiments in that post.

This morning I met a Twitter friend, @TJList, for the very first time, and not only was he kind and generous enough offter to drive up to my neck of the woods and video my presentation, but he came to the rescue when we discovered that the projector supplied was not compatible with my Mac. With some quick thinking and editing, we were able to translate my Keynote presentation to PowerPoint, put it on my flash drive, plug my flash drive into his PC laptop, and edit it (for the most part) so that it wasn’t as jumbled up as many times the translation from Keynote to PowerPoint goes. I wasn’t familiar with his computer at all (PCs seem rather backwards to me these days, though I can navigate them), but for being blindsided like that I think overall it went pretty well.

But honestly, I couldn’t have done it without him.

When I came back to the internet on my own computer and logged into TweetDeck, I was hit by a TON of @replies from my twitter friends who were saying nice things to me about one thing or another, whether it was considering me an honorary Detroiter (truth be told, I’m more of a Detroiter than a Flintstone, except when it comes to my coney preference), complimenting me on my new avatar pic that I took earlier in the day, or whatever. I had so many people saying so many nice things that I @replied a lot of folks and said, “I’ll call this #thankyouthursday”.

It caught on, and I inadvertently started a new meme.

Now that I think about it, I am so grateful for so many of my Twitter friends, those that I’ve met in real life and those that I haven’t yet, that I can’t believe we haven’t been doing this all along. It seems silly NOT to recognize those who say nice things to us or do nice things for us, even if it is on this “silly little online microblogging thingie” called Twitter. Twitter is invaluable to me, as I’m sure it is to many of you. Let’s not wait until Thanksgiving time to thank our Twitter pals for whatever you want to thank them for.

From now on, every Thursday I’m thanking some of my Twitter friends and hashtagging it #ThankYouThursday, because I believe expressing gratitude to deserving tweeple is much more meaningful than encouraging people to follow others for undeclared reasons.

So for my very first #ThankYouThursday, I would like to publicly recognize the following Tweeple:

@TJList – as stated above, without him, I would not have been able to do my presentation at all this morning

@mcwflint – for her mentorship, assistance, and advice on the presentation I this morning

@nickstaroba – for designing my new logo (which will be soon revealed on this site) on such a time crunch & being patient with my pickiness

@simplyjennifer – for being my go-to gal (for years) for all things geeky that my geekiness can’t figure out

@MotorCity - for considering me an honorary Detroiter

@LaurenWeber84 @EstrellaBella10 @ddelonge @charbrown @ctham @davepeckens @lisarobbinyoung @DJPlazma @bethkostecki @sslyb @AmeliaHelen -  for the compliments on my new avatar picture

So there’s my first list of #ThankYouThursday thank-yous. Obviously, it’s a Twitter meme, not a blog meme, I just did this as an initiation.  So now on Thursdays, tweet your thanks to a person, say why, & tag it #ThankYouThursday to tell the Twitterverse why that person is so nice.

My only concern is that maybe the tag is too long – #ThankYouThursday is 17 characters long. Should we shorten it to #TYThursday? Or maybe #ThanksThurs?

Let me know what you guys think in the comments.

Thanks!

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