by Mark Ollig

Created on: December 02, 2009

As the space shuttle Atlantis roared off launch pad 39A last Monday afternoon, 100 Twitter invitees were cheering and busily typing out messages to their followers.

In October, NASA signed up 100 people who tweet (send twitter messages) to come down to Florida for two days to see the launch up close, and to tweet about it over the Internet.

NASA viewed this tweetup event as being a beneficial outreach program to promote interest in the space program.

The 100 NASA Twitter followers in attendance took a tour of the Kennedy Space Center, talked with shuttle astronauts, technicians, and engineers. They also were there to observe and send out tweets before, during, and after the launch of the space shuttle.

The tweeps (invitees typing messages to Twitter) were situated at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, FL.

You can also call the tweeps, tweeters, too, but I do not want to be overly confusing to my faithful readers out there.

If you are a veteran user of Twitter, you will understand how easy it is to get lost in all the tweet-jargon-speak.

See, the Twitter icon (or mascot) is this cute small blue bird, so the jargon associated with it seems to be mostly bird-related.

The tweeps were headquartered under a huge NASA-provided tent, located in the press parking lot.

Inside the tent were rows of tables, hanging lights and many cords of electrical power strip outlets.

People inside were using video cameras, cell phones, display monitors, and, of course, sitting at the tables were the tweeps busily punching the keys on their notebook computers.

They were sharing with thousands of others over the Internet everything they were seeing and observing.

The tweeps were tweeting about the emotions they were feeling.

Your humble columnist was one of over 150,000 twitter followers who was being sent and responding back to these twitter messages in real-time.

About four hours before the launch, I logged onto my Twitter account and began following the #nasatweetup hashtag.

Hashtags (# followed by the subject name), are used on Twitter for following or tracking the topics, communities, live events, or news you have an interest in.

If you are a Twitter user and want to create a unique hashtag, just go to http://tagal.us and you can set them up from there.

I also opened web browser windows to a couple of other Internet media sources.

I could sense by the messages I was reading on Twitter, those participating in this nasatweetup were fully energized and excited to be at

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