Earlier this week, I had been tossing around thoughts for a blog post about using Twitter. Something between “How do you use Twitter?” and “How should we use Twitter?” with a dose of “Absolute No-no’s” tossed in for good measure.

Then the rains came.

Tuesday morning, some time before this 2nd shifter rolled out of bed, lightning flashed, thunder roared and suddenly Indiana was under 2-6 inches of rain, with more coming down. As is my usual unconscious morning (and more often than not noontime) routine, I shook the dogs off my chest, roamed to the home office and started making my online rounds.

But when the e-mail was checked and 20 of my 200-ish Facebook friends had declared their desire for the weekend, TweetDeck dropped a surprise on me. Not only was the rainfall outside my window stretching across most of the state, but Twitter was alive with people sharing their weather stories. In moments, I was taken to powerless streets on the southside, fender benders on the northside, cars up to their door handles in water on the west side and all the wetness in between.

Frankly, I was slightly amazed, though obviously for no reason.

Twitter, of course, is about people sharing parts of their lives. Usually, it’s aimed in the general direction of friends and acquaintances, but as a card-carrying member of the “Fourth Estate,” @WTHRcom gets to see it all. And for all the thousands of “Going to lunch…Eating lunch…Going back to work” tweets in the world, it was pretty cool to see what happens when an event brings us all together.

(”All together” is another post for another day. The roll call of who I share tweets with in a given week reads like the ultimate “walks into a bar” joke.)

The WTHR interactive radar I often jump to when rain and nastyness is near shows what kind of mess is hovering over your street. Our tweeps went above and beyond that on Tuesday. Twitter brought us pictures and live weather reports from every corner of the viewing area and it was terrific.

Even with crews scattered across the region, we can’t possibly see it all. Consider this a big-time “Thank You!” to all the tweeps who helped us see a little bit more.