The goal of this endeavor is to help connect businesses, individuals and other organizations in the local community through the use of the fast-growing micro-blogging platform called Twitter. I created the Twitter.com/Pleasantville account on March 31, and began tweeting (the updates on posts on Twitter are known as Tweets) information and news I thought would be of use to the Pleasantville community.

Within a couple of days, Pleasantville was following and being followed by several local people, which was encouraging — but a closer look at the list made me realize just how powerful this tool called Twitter could be. The connections that can be made at the local level is amazing.

One of our first Twitter connections was Chappaqua’s Walter Olson with his MidWestchester account. Walter’s posts provide information of use to anyone in the area of Chappaqua and surrounding communities, including some more general Westchester content. What Walter was doing with MidWestchester was helping to bring together people and organizations in a local community.

Upon further examination, I discovered that Walter Olson was no stranger to effective communication on the web. He is an author and a former practicing lawyer, who runs Overlawyered.com , possibly the oldest law blog in existence. Olson also runs the blog for the Manhattan Institute, PointOfLaw.com.

Another early Pleasantville connection is local author Joseph Wallace. His account, Joe_Wallace, includes many posts that provide insight into the life of a working author. Wallace has just begun work on a new novel. The book he recently finished, Ruby Diamond, is due out in 2010.

There are also Pleasantville businesses making good use of Twitter. One excellent example is FlourandSun, Pleasantville’s new cupcake bakery, that lets followers know what types of cupcakes have just come out of the kitchen. FlourandSun uses Twitpic.com to let followers click to see photos of the freshest, most creative cupcakes in Westchester.

Pleasantville’s popular movie theatre, the Jacob Burns Film Center, can be found on Twitter at JBFC_NY. The film center’s account links to their extremely useful website, and Twitter posts notify followers about recent programming changes or additions.

There are many other extremely interesting people and businesses interacting with Pleasantville on Twitter. Greenburgh Supervisor Paul Feiner is one of our followers, as is State Senator Suzi Oppenheimer. There are realtors, a pizza maker, a hair salon owner, an emergency preparedness businessman who has appeared on TV’s The Office, and a martial arts studio owner. There is a law student; a science fiction author and blogger; and a lawyer who writes books and plays guitar. The list goes on and on. I will  introduce many of these businesses and individuals in my upcoming blogs.

As of this writing, Pleasantville has a following of 115 mostly local individuals and organizations. The next goal for the @Pleasantville project is to dramatically increase the number of businesses participating, giving local residents more incentive to sign up for Twitter. I’m shooting for 500 mostly local followers by the end of June, and my plan is to make regular posts to this blog to keep readers informed about our progress. The real goal, of course, is not about numbers of followers, but of bringing benefits to the local community.

Twitter Professor is not affiliated with Twitter.com. Chris S. Cornell is not actually a professor (he runs Pleasantville’s Cornell Gallery Custom Frame Shop in his spare time), but he is interested in helping build local Twitter communities.  If you have questions or need help with Twitter, give Chris a call at (914) 741-1203. Feel free to add constructive comments, questions or criticisms in the comments section of this blog.