BostonTweet Covers the City 140 Characters at a Time

When Brookline resident Tom O’Keefe first logged on to Twitter in early 2008, he didn’t get it. “It made no sense to me whatsoever,” he laughs. If you are one of the 25,748 followers of BostonTweet, you’ll understand exactly why that’s so ironic. Today, both onscreen and off, “Most people just call me BostonTweet,” O’Keefe says.

 By November 2008 O’Keefe had wrapped his head around how the 140-character-or-less social networking site could be put to good use. Rather than tweeting as and about himself, he created the moniker BostonTweet and began focusing on the world around him—which was, in his case, Boston. “Instead of looking in at me, I looked out at what I saw in the city, in Boston, just talking a lot about local events. Twitter made a whole lot more sense to me then.” Apparently his utilization of Twitter as BostonTweet made sense to a lot of other people too. In the time since November 2008, O’Keefe’s tweets have become a reliable—and sometimes amusing—source for local recommendations and happenings.

Initially, O’Keefe’s goals for BostonTweet were simple. As he saw the economy crashing down around him, he wanted to do his own small part to make sure Bostonians continued to support local businesses. “Granularly, I wanted to make sure people were still going to the Publick House in Washington Square where, at the time, I was going almost every single night. I just had this great fear that no one would be out—that everyone would be home watching TV. I wanted to remind people that these businesses are still here, they still need to survive, they need your help.”

For O’Keefe, the road to BostonTweet was a roundabout one. Upon graduating from Boston College in the mid-90s, he worked for seven years as a financial analyst specializing in Internet stocks. As he plugged away in a cubicle looking at these stocks, it dawned on him that he should be partaking in the dot-com boom rather than merely observing it. From there, he co-founded a number of Internet start-ups, the first of which was a before-its-time social networking site called Wired Alumni. “Since then, I’ve just had the bug,” O’Keefe says.

Ironically, despite all of his prior more organized Internet business endeavors, BostonTweet was, to an extent, accidental. “Everything else I had done in the past had a business plan and all that garbage. BostonTweet didn’t, and it’s far and away the most popular and lucrative thing I’ve ever done. But it’s all about creating exposure and influence first, and not worrying about trying to make money. Which is kind of funny because I was really hard up when I started.”

Though BostonTweet is definitively not a business in and of itself, it has nonetheless opened professional doors that do pay the rent and allow O'Keefe to run BostonTweet simultaneously. “I see Twitter as a way to get my foot in the door at various places. I don’t make a dime off what I tweet. No one pays me to say anything about a place—and I like it that way because in a way it is media and I don’t want to be biased.” In that vein, O’Keefe’s ahead-of-the-curve utilization of new media has made him a local expert of sorts, earning him occasional invitations to guest lecture at Boston University and Emerson College. Similarly, Groupon identified O’Keefe through BostonTweet and brought him on as a local rep for the booming company. "I make money off making connections with companies, with Groupon being the biggest example," O'Keefe explains.

Even if BostonTweet is not a business per se, it’s still a full-time gig at this point—and a fun one. Rather than toiling away in a cubicle as he did for the first several years of his career, being out-and-about and interacting with the city is now a big part of O’Keefe’s daily life. “I spent seven years in a cubicle getting fat. They just throw food in there at you,” he chuckles. This is a far cry from O’Keefe’s current lifestyle, where, he says, “I walk everywhere. I’m out there every single day, just getting out and bopping around. I lost 50 pounds as soon as I left [office life]. I’m kind of that crazy guy that waves to people.”

 For a concept that was somewhat elusive just three years ago, O’Keefe marvels at how far-reaching the impact of Twitter has become in such a short time. “I think the example of how Twitter influenced a revolution in 18 days in Egypt is just an amazing power that really says it’ll be here for awhile.“

And, of course, the effect of Twitter and other emerging technologies is felt in much smaller ways as well. As O’Keefe sees it, part of the beauty of the Internet is that it gives individuals the chance to create their own opportunities. “I was able to create the job for me that I wanted—that I wasn’t able to get on the outside, or no one could tell me how to do. That’s the thing about the Internet—you can create whatever it is you want to do if you set your mind to it and become an expert in that field. Have you ever seen Office Space? It’s one of the scariest movies ever. I’ll watch that every six months or so and be like, ‘don’t ever go back to that.' Times are so different now. Everyone can work remotely like never before.”