He’s a man who does not need me to tell you why he’s a Follow Friday! After all, Mr. Jeff Pulver has 365K+ followers! But after attending the #140Conf in San Francisco yesterday, I can’t help but make him my Top Follow Friday today!

Jeff Pulver spoke yesterday at his conference (#140Conf) on “Legacy in the era of the Real-Time Web.” In just 10 minutes I thought about Twitter, and the online social interactions in general, in a whole new and different way than I did prior to coming to this conference. Simply put, Jeff Pulver stated (something like), “each time we send out a tweet, write a blog post or put something up on Facebook, we are creating our own legacy. What we write, photograph and video today will be the message that our future relatives are able to extract about us years and decades from now.”

Later that day I got to thinking about this.

Jeff Pulver, #140conf San Francisco

If I want to know something about my ancestors and past family members, it is much more difficult to dig it up from the archives than it is today. Thus, I don’t know much about them. For example, I know the handed-down stories from my Mother and Grandmother about my Great Grandmother, but that’s about as far is it goes.

These verbal “stories” are what we are producing via the World Wide Web today. We are not just creating a plethora of noise, but instead a “real-time account” of who we are, what we are thinking and what is happening at that very moment in time. Think that’s boring? I beg to differ.

At the end of the year last year I created a “Facebook: My Year in Status Review” of the previous year. You may have created your own? The application looked like THIS. And as I was going through all my Facebook Status Updates for the year, it brought me back to remembering where I was and what I was doing at that point in my life. Some made me laugh. Some made me cry. And others had me thinking, “Wow! That really happened just this past year?”

That Facebook Year in Review was a story of my life in 2009. And that was just one year! Think about turning 100 and having a whole book of “stories,” broken up into yearly “chapters.” And all you had to do was re-visit those daily thoughts and interactions you shared with the world.

Now fast-forward 100 years. The world as we know it today will look completely different. Technology will more than likely be so far advanced from what it is today that our great, great grandchildren will look back on our “story” and say, “Wow, Mom, Great, Great Grandma was one cool chick. If I could have lunch with one person dead or alive, I would choose her!” Well that, and, ‘“I wonder what that “old technology” was like? Seems so ancient!”’

Thank you, Jeff Pulver, for reminding me yet again that the World Wide Web is not just a bunch of jibber or a place for the rich and famous only. It’s truly a Legacy in the makings!

ps. You are also a Top Follow Friday because you have speakers doing “stunts” like this:

See you at #140Conf Los Angeles!