Last night I rocked out at the ultimate tweet-up, TwestivalSF, with a couple hundred fellow micro-bloggers. The event was one of the 175+ city Twestivals around the world that brought together thousands of people in Twitter communities to raise money and awareness for charity:water.  The non-profit helps provide clean drinking water to people in developing nations, and for the cost of one $20 ticket, one person can enjoy clean water for 20 years.  Now that’s a great cause that can’t be fit into just one 140 character tweet!

I arrived at the venue, SoMa’s Paradise Lounge, fashionably late (or so I thought), but there was still a line outside in which party-goers were tweeting their arrival. Upon my entry, I spotted all 10 people by the front bar staring down at their mobile devices, thumbs firing away at key-pads. I should have prefaced that this is my first tweet-up, and my first reaction to the 10 tweeters was “is a tweet-up when we all stand in one room and tweet to each other?”  Can you imagine – “hey @hotguyinthecorner I like your velour blazer, how’s that martini?” I was a little apprehensive, but after moving through to the main room, I saw about 50 more people in actual conversation – phew!

I made my way to the nametag – Twitter handles only please – and schwag table, where I scored a TwestivalSF branded goodies, a mouse pad and some sweet gift certificates.  Near the table, I ran into Roderick, food blogger and web site / graphic designer, and we had a great conversation about cotton candy and micro-surgery.  He also told me that re-tweeting was so two years ago, unless you’re trying to build a stronger follower base.

Upstairs, in the back room where all the cool kids were hanging out, I chatted with Twitter data-baser, Jay Edwards (@meangrape), who gave some great advice for defining my Twitter voice. I’m relatively new to Twitter, but I do know that I don’t want to add to the noise. Although, there’s little hope he’ll be following me anytime soon (he maintains a 1:10 following to follower ratio), he let me know that it’s good to discuss multiple topics and to engage with people in genuine conversation. He’d rather see valuable snippets that run the gamut of topics that actually interest me, instead of a one-minded channel or a stream of vertical news that I think will interest other people.  I also met up with Nick (@VirginAmerica) who after trying to get me to bid $502 on two Virgin America ticket vouchers, filled me in on the details of his full-time social media watch-dog job and some of his best practices for leading a brand on Twitter.

Other notable internet celeb sightings:

· Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone (@biz), arriving with his tweeps, including Twitter CEO, Evan Williams (@ev), and their own ABC News camera crew

· DIGG founder, Kevin Rose (@kevinrose), huddled by the back bar chatting it up with some beautiful women

· Scott Beale (@laughingsquid) chatting it up with Biz Stone and many entrepreneurs

When I wasn’t meeting my tweeps for the first time in-person, I hung out by the red velvet cupcake table with VentureWire reporter, Tomio Geron (@tgsf), Nutrition53’s Kristine Manlapaz, and Financial Content’s Joe Spector (@JoeTheRuski).  It was a great night hanging out with cool people and for a fantastic cause. I learned a lot more in-person about Twitter etiquette than I could’ve doing web research, and I got to share and hear about some great do’s and don’t’s for representing your personal and company brand in the Twitterverse.

- Jacqueline (@jacqattack)