Indra, and expanding this thing with Twitter

Down to the sand-covered earth.
Straw from the harvested fields soiled our feet;
Dust from the high-roads,
Smoke from the cities,
Foul-smelling breaths,
Fumes from cellars and kitchens,
All we endured.
Then to the open sea we fled,
Filling our lungs with air,
Shaking our wings,
And laving our feet.

Part from ‘Indra’ by August Strindberg (1849-1912)

I’m not the kind of person who dives deep into books of poetry to calm a saddened heart on a late, summer evening. Even so, I can appreciate a good poem when I see it. I wanted to share the above piece, written by Sweden’s probably most influential playwright and author of all times, because I think it can be interpreted as our journey towards the release of Aion here in Europe and North America. If you have imagination, which I hope you do, I’m sure you can picture lines 1-7 as your previous online gaming experiences and lines 8-11 as your future Aion experience!

For those of you who have been following the news updates here on Aiononline.com I’m sure you caught glimpse of our great “Twitter update” (depending on how quick you are, since this blog post went live mere minutes after that news announcement). Twittering has been a fine tradition here in the community team, much like our animal sacrificial rituals or celebrating Christmas. The important message to take with you from his Twitter change is that we will now be twittering under our names rather than as a language. For an example “aion_de” is “aion_amboss” (still in German) while “aion_en” has been split into “aion_ayase” (mine), “aion_liv” (Liv) and “aion_xaen” (Brian Knox, Aion’s producer). The obvious benefit with doing this is that we’re now 3 doing twittering in English, which will mean many more times the content and diversity, many more times the fun. We will all be able to contribute with different types of things, and I suggest you start “following” (Twitter-lingo) each one of us to make sure you catch us all. My own “aion_ayase” will tend to focus on community activities and random interesting facts and features that pop up out on various sites spontaneously. I have about 540 Twitter followers as of this writing, but I know there are many more of you out there and I want you to join.

One of the questions I know some of you are asking is: What the heck is Twitter and why do you have to insist on using all this modern technology?

Twitter, in short, is just an RSS feed optimized for shorter messages. And we all love RSS feeds! By signing up for your own Twitter account you can reply to my twitters tweets (that’s what you call the messages if you’re in the cool crowd *cough*), make your own and be sure to not miss any Twitter activities we do in the future!

I think that’s all I have to say today. Next week we’ll have another legion highlight feature coming up, don’t miss that. Oh, and pay a visit to our latest addition to the fansite programme - AionPhoenix - located over at http://www.aionphoenix.com.

That’s all, folks. Have a divinely (!) continued week and weekend.
/Ayase