The following video shows some of the action, and it includes interviews with people on both sides of the issue. I look forward to reading your comments, but please understand the viewpoints expressed in the video are those of the participants in the rally and they do not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of ValleyoftheSuns.

Now you can also get to the site on the iPhone via the newly-released Fan Pulse app, which allows you to:

• Follow teams like the Suns and trash talk fans of other teams before, during and after the game (not that I would ever suggest something like that or anything.)
• Get scores and breaking news sent right to your iPhone.
• Read not just scores but commentary from blogs such as this one.

Here’s what TechCrunch had to say about the app:

Yes, it’s sort of like setting up an online chat room or group IM session, but the app has other benefits. First, it’s on the iPhone, so you don’t need your computer out to chat. Second, the app gives you Push Notification updates for the game, as well as other games you may be interested in following — so you can multitask. Third, by “shouting” (their word for sending a message), you can also send these messages out to Twitter or Facebook with one click to update your statuses on those networks.

When you’re on the go during a big game, this app is a great way to stay close to ValleyoftheSuns — and maybe talk a little smack to Lakers fans while you’re at it.

Everybody is invited, readers and non-readers alike (although I suppose it would be kind of hard for you to hear about this if you aren’t a reader). We’re going to be doing some pre-game get-together at a local bar as well, so it will be a fun time to get to know your bloggers a little bit. I certainly look forward to meeting a bunch of you guys.

The details are as follows:

PHOENIX — The Suns’ marketing team coined the phrase Planet Orange a few years back to encompass the idea that all Suns fans share an almost familial bond on this planet.

At the #SunsTweetUp during Tuesday’s game against the Spurs, Suns tweeters came together like a bunch of long-lost cousins at a family reunion.

Unfortunately I didn’t really get to share in this family bonding until the question and answer period at the end because my last-minute seats were way up in the nosebleeds away from many of the tweeps.

But the question and answer session saw tweeps finding out that the random stranger walking in front of them is somebody they talk to all the time after a glance at their name tag. Others you could tell by their Twitter profile pic (either that or you’ve been doing a bit too much Facebook stalking …..)

One tweeter, @CWebbie, flew all the way from ATLANTA to be a part of the festivities, which makes me ashamed for thinking that US Airways Center is far from my North Scottsdale home, and she took pictures with all the tweeters she encountered.

I asked her what made her become a Suns fan all the way over in Hawks territory, and she said it started with her being a Grant Hill fan since he was a Dukie but that the Suns were the first team she really fell in love with.

A check of my Twitter page after the game showed a multitude of Suns tweeps expressing how excited they were to finally meet their Twitter friends in real life while lamenting the fact that there wasn’t enough time to meet all the tweeters in attendance.

Like Jeramie McPeek was talking about in the preview of this event, meeting face to face takes that connection to a whole new level. On one hand, you feel like you’ve known these people all your life, and on the other hand you just met.

For example, i rant with @ZoDogg34 about Suns basketball and University of Arizona sports all the time, but it was nice to meet the man behind the Twitter handle.

It really did feel like a big family reunion, only the US Airways Center ushers were shooing us out before we had a chance to meet that one final long-lost cousin.

The speaker of the night, to me at least, was Suns head coach Alvin Gentry. He was his usual humorous self, a side that the media gets to see of him during pregame chats in his office but that the general public doesn’t always get to see. He looked like he would be happy to answer questions all night.

His funniest response came to a fan who asked him about clearing some space for his upcoming 2009-10 Coach of the Year award. He replied that he’s happy to be November Coach of the Month, but he doesn’t want win the year award because the last handful of coaches to earn that honor have since been fired.

He also joked that 10 of his autographs equal one Phil Jackson autograph and he asked a fan questioning how he keeps his cool when the refs stink if they watched the Denver game. Gentry also said Kobe should be the MVP at this point and gave the Suns’ team MVP award to the whole squad before invoking the name of Steve.

Jared Dudley came out for a quick taping of JMZ — Fan Edition. Dudley has developed something of a cult following in Phoenix between his hustling style of play and the unprecedented inside access he provides the fans.

I think JMZ is one of the greatest things a pro athlete has done for fans in terms of taking them behind the curtain, BUT — and you knew one was coming — he seemed more concerned with promoting all he’s doing than really interacting with the fans tonight.

I’ll be the first to say that I LOVE all of his inside access, it’s the kind of stuff fans were missing even a year ago. It’s just that his talk was all about getting fans excited about what Dudley was doing instead of being more of a give and take. I do have to give him credit for his perfect display of showmanship to the adoring crowd, and signing a fan’s “Dudley No. 3″ headband as he walked off was a nice finishing touch.

Finally, the main man Amare came on with his two little kids by his side, and he did not disappoint. One of STAT’s first questions was about how far out he was when dunking on Duncan, and later he said he felt like he’s 100 percent healthy at long last, and he really looked it during tonight’s game.

It was interesting to see a mix of questions the media would ask and questions the media would never ask. We also got the predictable question about whether Amare will stay in Phoenix past this season, and we got a predictable, “Absolutely.” I just wonder what Amare would say if he were speaking to New York fans.

One last interesting note from Amare, he was asked about the Hebrew words he sometimes tweets. STAT said that he studied Hebrew during his recovery from eye surgery when he had to sit face down for 22 hours a day for 10 straight days. It looks like Sun Tzu spent time catching up on the education he never got in college this summer when he could not work on his game.

As the #SunsTweetUp reunion came to a close, my only disappointment was not getting to meet more citizens of Planet Orange.

An odd sight

You see your regular stream of Amare, Nash and Hill jerseys at any Suns game, but I was surprised to see a girl wearing a homemade Goran Dragic jersey as I was entering US Airways Center. I asked her why she fashioned a shirt after the Dragon and she said he was her favorite player.

I thought it was a little strange at the time being that it wasn’t like she was his girlfriend or anything, but after Goran’s 18-point explosion I promise not to doubt anybody wearing homemade Goran Dragic jerseys again.

That’s why all @PhoenixSuns fans on Twitter should attend Tuesday’s second annual Tweet-Up when the Suns take on the @Spurs at 7 p.m. in US Airways Center. Lower-level tickets cost $64 (discounted from $132.25) and upper-level tickets $32 (discounted from $35.50). You can get these special offers with the discount password “tweeps.”

Besides getting to sit with all your tweeps, this package includes early entry into @SunsCrib, discounts on pregame “Twitter Tailgate” concessions, a Tweet-Up T-shirt and a 10-15 minute postgame Q and A with @Amareisreal himself. Live tweets will be displayed on the Jumbotron and the television broadcast as usual as well.

The Suns held the NBA’s first-ever tweet-up last season and got over 100 tweeps to come out and enjoy a game. They expect at least twice the attendance this time around.

“I think the fact that it was the first-ever tweet-up in the NBA was exciting for our followers who came, and it was also the first time most of them had met each other in person,” said Suns VP of digital operations Jeramie McPeek, otherwise known as @SunsWebmaster. “They were all familiar with each other on Twitter, but to actually meet face to face takes that connection to a new level.

“We’re trying to take our Tweet-Up to a new level this season, though. It should really be a fun event!”

What I like best about this event, and why I plan on attending it instead of getting regular press credentials, is that you get to put a face to a Twitter handle. It’s one thing to complain about the officiating against Denver with people you’ve never met, and it’s another thing to strengthen that bond by actually enjoying a game together in person.

“I love our fans on Twitter,” McPeek said. “I’m now in my 18th season with the Suns, and have always received letters or e-mails, or even the occasional calls from our fans, who want to share feedback on our magazine, back in the day, or our websites in more recent years.

“But the whole social media explosion has really given me a new appreciation for our fans, as I’m now able to interact with them on a daily basis. It’s really encouraging and even motivating to know there are so many people out there who enjoy the content we produce and who live and breathe Suns basketball. Their passion is contagious!”

So step away from your computer and come meet some of your fellow Suns tweeps. And don’t worry, you can always still tweet from your phone.

PHOENIX — Confetti streamed down from the ceiling, “We are the Champions” blared over the sound system, and if you closed your eyes you could almost pretend like the Phoenix Suns had just won their first ever championship at US Airways Center.

Yes, a lighting fast, top-notch shooting basketball team won a championship last night in Phoenix, and that of course was the Phoenix Mercury, who may be on their way to a WNBA dynasty after winning their second title in three years.

Fans went berserk all around me, and it was kind of a shock to see fans get so excited over anything that happens in the WNBA. The crowd was loud, the fans around me were living and dying with every shot, and dare I say it, Game 5 of the WNBA Finals was one exciting basketball game.

Of course there were no high-flying theatrics, but if you forget about that this was just a very high level basketball game with teams on both sides making tough clutch shot after tough clutch shot.

My experience with the Mercury this season did indeed start about five minutes into the first quarter (after scalping a pair of tickets for $15 total, which was much easier than I even imagined it would be), but from watching this game it seems pretty obvious that they play atrocious interior defense.

Diana Taurasi — the MVP of the Finals, the MVP of the regular season and the MVP of blowing a 0.17 BAC — is a 6-foot-nothing guard, and as special of a player as she is on the offensive end, Indiana’s bigs scored at will against her and other Mercury interior defenders.

Why bring this up on a night that should be solely dedicated to talking about a championship? It’s because I’m fascinated that a team with such a weak interior presence can run and shoot its way to a second championship in three years.

Does that remind anybody else of a certain NBA team with a weak interior presence that hopes to run and shoot its way to a championship one of these days?

In recent weeks, I’ve made the connection about the Mercury proving that a basketball team can win a championship in Seven Seconds or Less, so to speak, but now I wonder if that’s the difference between the men’s and women’s games. Speed and skill is the name of the game in women’s basketball, winning over size and muscle. As the Suns have found out in recent years, that’s not exactly the case in the NBA.

Still, I was overly impressed with the Mercury tonight. They made a play on offense every time they needed to, and Taurasi and Cappie Pondexter are stars’ stars.

I do certainly wonder if this year’s WNBA playoffs and WNBA Finals will spark a bit of a revival in the game.

Let’s be honest, the WNBA has been more than an afterthought pretty much since its inception to all but the most diehard of fans. But after seeing the Mercury sell out Game 5 (with a little help from the Suns’ captains) and Indiana’s fans come out in full force, it feels like the perception of the game is changing little by little.

Every day I go on Twitter there’s another NBA blogger or fan talking about how surprised they are that they like the WNBA as much as they do.

As I have written, I haven’t given a crap about the league since its inaugural season. But I had a really, really good time watching that championship. It was fun, exciting basketball that any basketball fan would enjoy.

Now it did certainly feel more than a bit strange to “celebrate” a championship won by a team I was just getting to know. The beauty of a championship — as Red Sox fans learned in 2004 and Suns fans will know one day — stems from the agony of defeat, being vindicated for all those excruciating losses after which you longed for this day.

Even the D-backs’ championship in 2001 felt like the greatest thing to ever happen after living and dying with that team for four years and watching every other team I’d ever loved lose its final game.

To all the fans of the Mighty Mercury, congratulations. You deserve this day in the sun.

As for all you Suns fans out there, know that one day the scene below could be yours.

Quite honestly, I’m pretty excited for my first taste of WNBA basketball since I was in middle school.

No, I’m not going all Phoenix Stan or Ben York on you, but in any sport really nothing beats the excitement of a winner-takes-all championship game.

I still do think that a Lifelock Mercury title answers the question on if a professional basketball team can win a championship in Seven Seconds or Less to at least a tiny, tiny degree — especially since it would be their second title in three years — and I think it’s exciting to have at least one fast, elite shooting basketball team win something in this town.

I do, however, feel like more of a bandwagon fan than any Arizona Cardinal “fan” that came out of the woodworks during January’s Super Bowl run. Where are those Cardinals fans when the Texans come calling on a lonely October Sunday?

I last attended a Mercury game with my family during the WNBA’s inaguaral year of 199-whatever the hell it was. I enjoyed the game, got real into, celebrated every shot and then never cared about the WNBA again until my Twitterfeed shoved the league down my throat the past few months. I didn’t even give it anything more than a, ‘Hmmm, that’s nice,’ when the Merc won it all two years ago.

In those years, it became incredibly uncool to be a fan of the WNBA, at least among my friends in high school and college. It would have been better accepted for me to say I’m a fan of curling than to say I’m a WNBA fan, and for that reason I’ve spent the last decade or so of my life ignoring the league save for a few quick glances in the morning paper.

The only thing cool about the WNBA used to involve seeing who could make the best joke about how lame it is (this video wins my vote on that count).

But now the tide seems to be turning on that school of thought. Former VotS podcast panelist Ben York is leading the charge with his seemingly daily love ballads to Mercury basketball and Phoenix Stan of Bright Side isn’t far behind him, traveling all the way to Indianapolis to cover a WNBA game. Never in my life did I think I’d see the day when a blogger would travel to cover a WNBA game when the local paper doesn’t even do so.

Respected basketball writers like Kelly Dwyer are tweeting things like, “I can’t remember the last time I’ve had this much fun, halfway into a basketball game. That’s not me going over the top, or fawning, either,” when talking about the WNBA, all the while hosting a live blog from a WNBA game that he’s covering.

These guys have made me feel like I’m the lame one because I largely haven’t really cared about the Merc’s playoff run.

But that all changes tonight.

There’s nothing worse than a bandwagon fan, but in this case, who could blame me?

Look for me somewhere in the upper deck, or wherever the scalpers put me. I’ll be wearing my sister’s old Michele Timms jersey with “Mercury” on the front before the days of Lifelock. No, the jersey hasn’t been dusted off in at least a decade, and no, that’s not how I ever thought I’d spend a Friday night in my mid-20′s.

So all you closet WNBA fans who have never had a reason to care, join me at US Airways Center tonight because there’s certainly nothing uncool about a Phoenix basketball championship.

Today I will bring you a collection of assorted thoughts on the Suns and social media that didn’t make my previous piece.

A rundown of Suns social media entities

The Suns and their players are all over the place on social media. Here’s a list of some of their bigger profiles, pages and handles.

Twitter

@PhoenixSuns – about 17,000 followers (No. 23 among NBA Twitter handles)

@the_real_nash – about 88,000 followers (No. 7)

@Amareisreal – about 32,300 followers (No. 13)

@jrich23 – about 25,000 followers (No. 16)

@JaredDudley619 – about 5,500 followers

@eegabeeva88 (Robin Lopez) – about 1,800 followers

Facebook

Phoenix Suns – about 51,000 fans

Steve Nash – about 530,000 fans

Amare Stoudemire – about 12,000 fans

MySpace

Phoenix Suns – about 8,000 friends

YouTube

Phoenix Suns – about 2,800 subscribers

Suns Social Sites

PlanetOrange.Net

Suns Twackle

Tweeting it up

The Suns held the first-ever NBA tweetup last season in which they invited about 120 fans through their Twitter profiles to go down to the practice court and hear from GM Steve Kerr about the team’s direction.

The Suns were also part of a contest during the playoffs in which teams battled for the NBA Twophy, a contest to see what team could get the most Twitter followers. Just like in real basketball, the Lakers did win, but Suns VP of digital operations Jeramie McPeek said the Suns ranked second at the end of the playoffs, and they are currently fifth behind the Lakers, Magic, Bulls and Celtics, who all play in some fairly decent-sized markets.

“Even though we weren’t in the playoffs we got a huge boost in followers,” McPeek said. “All the NBA teams really took off from that challenge. The Lakers did (win), which is understandable. I think everyone in LA is on Twitter, and the Lakers went all the way to the Finals.”

Twitter and the mainstream media

At first, the mainstream media thought Twitter was a joke.

Now, it’s becoming standard practice to report news right from Twitter.

Because seriously, why wouldn’t you?

Twitter is a primary source of exactly what these athletes are thinking, and it’s an invaluable tool.

Still, I chuckle every time when I see the media report a story such as Allen Iverson signing with Memphis and attribute Twitter as a main source. It just sounds awkward, and you know some of these veterans journalists must be wondering what this world is coming to when one of their main sources in a big story is Twitter.

Sure, you can say Shaq got everyone involved with the NBA into Twitter (and really he did make it “cool” for basketball players to tweet), but the turning point to me with NBA and Twitter came when Kevin Love tweeted about the firing of Kevin McHale at the start of the offseason.

Think about it. A major player reported a major front office move. No unnamed source close to the team with knowledge of the discussion speaking under the condition of anonymity, but an actual player putting his name next to it and accurately reporting the news.

McPeek told me he sees social media becoming the media, and this is why. Players can now cut out the middleman (the media) that in the past they needed to become popular enough to make all their endorsement money.

Now players can talk to the fans directly in their own voice, and the only way they’ll be taken out of context is if they take themselves out of context.

Journalists are now essentially reporting what athletes say that everyone else is privy to anyway, as opposed to closed to the public locker rooms and private conversations that only they are privy to.

There will always be a place for news gatherers and there are plenty of stories that players won’t touch, but I see social media leading to another fundamental change in how the media operates in the future, just as the demise of newspapers currently is.

Restrictions on the media

We don’t know what the NBA’s Twitter policy will be, but I’m already getting nervous, particularly as it pertains to reporters.

Under the NFL’s policy, media personnel can’t tweet during games in a way that provides play by play; they can only give essentially quarterly updates.

If this applies to me in any game I cover, that would mean I could tweet a game as much as I want if I’m watching it on my TV at home but I could only tweet essentially at quarter breaks if I’m actually there.

Same person, same analysis, but just because I’m at the arena means I’m under different rules.

That is so ridiculous because the media should be able to tweet whatever interesting outside details that fans don’t see on TV. Since it’s not picked up on TV, this is not infringing on the TV rights whatsoever.

We live in an age of connectivity in which anybody can know what’s happening at any time if they so please. Media members should not be restricted in what they are allowed to tweet in the arena.

But would you say that to his face?

When your friend asks you if he thinks Amare Stoudemire will ever win an NBA championship, you give him an honest answer.

But what do you say when Amare Stoudemire asks that question?

The greatest part about Twitter involves the interaction between players and fans. In my mind, every player should be doing everything he can to connect with fans as much as possible by being as real as possible. Jared Dudley is doing this naturally.

I bring up the Amare example because STAT recently tweeted, “If I stay with the Phoenix Suns, will I ever win Chmpionship? What do you think world. Suns fan be true to me. Don’t be biased!! Real Talk!”

So real talk he got.

The answers varied widely, but it’s amazing to think that real people like you and me would have the balls to tell Amare things like, “Real talk? Not unless YOU get fully committed to playing D. If not they’ll trade you anyways.”

People responded to Amare as if he were their buddy, not a superstar athlete whom they’ll probably never meet. You can essentially now directly tell people what you could only scream at them through the TV before.

It will be interesting to see if athletes continue to make Twitter more of a two-way street instead of a one-way street in which they’re telling us what they’re doing. I wonder how far they will go to show they care about us, and I wonder how personal fans will make their criticism now that they can theoretically talk directly to these athletes.

My experience in social media

I’ll be honest, Twitter took me a little while.

I’ve been on Facebook since Nov. 11, 2004, (yes, I’m that pathetic that I remember the exact day), but Twitter was tough for me.

I’ve been following it closely since Shaq started to make it cool, but it wasn’t until about three weeks ago that I decided to dive headfirst into the Twitter pool.

That was one of the biggest reasons I wanted to talk to all the Suns tweeps that I did. Before I felt like an outsider, but now I’m just “one of the guys” in the Suns’ Twitter community.

What I learned first and foremost is that if you want to add a few followers and become a part of that community then you need to tweet and tweet often (and then retweet). I tweeted roughly 300 times in my first four or five months on Twitter, and I’ve tweeted about 200 times in the last three weeks.

No, that doesn’t mean I haven’t had a life these past few weeks, it just means I’ve made an effort to join this community, and you’ll find pretty soon that it’s addicting and not nearly as lame as your friends would make you think. Still, it’s still tough to grasp the fact that I have “Twitter friends.”

The Suns Twitter people are a welcoming crew, so if you aren’t already on, get your account and start tweeting away.

You might even one day soon find your tweet on the big screen at USAC.

When you go to cities like Washington D.C. and New York, you almost don’t need to rent a car their public transportation is so good. In fact, I can’t see any reason why anybody would ever rent a car in DC.

But Phoenix is ahead of the curve in one area of public transit after US Airways Center and the METRO light rail announced an agreement on Thursday in which anybody with a ticket to a USAC event gets free light rail fare four hours prior to the event through the end of the day.

The light rail still isn’t so great if you live anywhere except for Tempe, Mesa or downtown Phoenix. When I want to ride the light rail downtown (which I sometimes do to avoid the hassles of parking and to pass out ValleyoftheSuns business cards to unsuspecting passengers), I drive all the way to Tempe, wait 15 minutes for the train and end up traveling for well over an hour when the trip from my house would have been just about 40 minutes.

The next step to make Phoenix a truly public transit-friendly city would involve expanding the light rail to all the areas that people actually are, but we must be happy about what we can be happy about for now.

Although it’s not unprecedented for a team to offer free public transportation to a game, this program, which will run from the beginning of October for a year, is the first of its kind in America between an arena and a public transportation entity.

“Suns fans who used light rail to travel to games last year told us that being able to avoid traffic and parking issues, as well as the ease and convenience of the trip, resulted in an experience that enhanced their enjoyment of attending a game,” Suns CEO Rick Welts said in a release. “We appreciate the willingness and creativity the leadership at METRO light rail demonstrated in developing this program for all US Airways Center events.”

This partnership does knock a couple more reasons off your list of why you shouldn’t go to a Suns game. Now you don’t have to worry about paying for parking (it’s free to park in a light rail Park and Ride lot) and you don’t have to worry about driving, unless you live out in Scottsdale or something like that.

It’s nice to see public transportation in this city actually start to make a dent. Now if only they’d do something about those concession prices.

@Amareisreal and @the_real_nash show their human side through social media outlets such as Twitter. (Photo Illustration/Eric Vogt and Mike Schmitz)

For years, fans could only view their NBA heroes through the lenses of the media and a PR-savvy league.

Players were towering, athletic fish in a fish bowl, only to be gawked at on the court before leaving the confines of the arena to lead their own private, mysterious lives.

Fast forward to this offseason, and anybody with an Internet connection knows who Jared Dudley worked out with this summer, what disguise Steve Nash wore when playing pickup ball in China and even that Amare Stoudemire was going in for more eye surgery in July – before the team made an official announcement or a beat reporter broke the news.

A league that made its name through stars like Michael Jordan becoming larger than life figures is seeing all those walls torn down with fans and NBA players alike now sharing the same social media sandbox.

“It’s almost like taking a peek behind the curtain and seeing The Wizard of Oz,” said D Vasquez, better known on Twitter as @knot2serious. “Seeing the human side is always interesting.”

Changing the way fans and players interact

The explosion of social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and even Ustream has given athletes an opportunity to show themselves as real human beings.

That means there will be moments in which Stephon Marbury eats Vaseline and Brandon Jennings makes a career’s worth of boneheaded comments in one small clip, but there will also be humanizing interactions between fans and players in which they seem to be living in the same world, such as when Dudley recently asked fans to guess the high score in a Suns bowling match and J-Rich wrote about attending a 10-year high school reunion.

“I’ve come to fully realize that ALL NBA players are just as human as the rest of us,” said life-long Suns fan Lori Ann Superfan (@LoriAnnSUPERFAN), an avid tweeter.

Added Suns fan tweeter Paige Dell’Armi (@paigeiam): “There is just something about getting a text message update from @the_real_nash and @matrix31 on what they are doing right that second. It’s like they are your real friends. When @the_real_shaq @ed me back on a comment, I knew my life was complete. ”

In the past, players would leave for the summer and you wouldn’t hear from them for months unless they were negotiating a new contract through the media. It would be as if they were hibernating during the summer, waiting for training camp and another season to begin anew.

Now, if you’re on Twitter, it’s impossible NOT to know what’s going on with your favorite NBA players.

Building an online community

The Suns were one of the first professional sports organizations to embrace social media.

It all started back in the winter of 2007, according to Suns VP of digital operations Jeramie McPeek (@SunsWebmaster), during a time in which the organization’s whole online strategy revolved around driving traffic to Suns.com.

That mind-set started to change after McPeek attended the NBA’s annual marketing meeting at which an NBA official spoke of the value of MySpace and YouTube, citing research that said many NBA fans will never venture to a team site but do spend time on those social mediums.

McPeek then thought, “‘Well, maybe we can put stuff on those sites and draw people back to Suns.com.”

This social strategy led to the Suns’ October 2007 launch of PlanetOrange.net, the team’s official social network, to provide a controlled environment in which fans can talk about the Suns. From there the organization branded a Facebook page with 50,000-plus fans and a Twitter handle with almost 17,000 followers, ranking it No. 22 among NBA-related Twitter entities, according to WeFollow.com.

Now, Suns fans practically can’t go anywhere on the Web without running into some Suns-related content, particularly on Twitter.

Not only do Amare, Nash, Dudley, Jason Richardson, Robin Lopez and head coach Alvin Gentry tweet, but so do 15-20 Suns employees, further giving fans an inside look at the team.

“It’s a great way to find new fans, to make new fans, to grow casual fans and really get them to connect with your team and feel like they’re sort of hearing what’s going on behind the scenes,” McPeek said. “Before they really didn’t have a way to directly communicate with the organization on a regular basis. We’re able to reach out and connect with them in that way as well.”

To Suns season ticket holder Josh Miller, known by the Twitter handle @ZoDogg34, the best part about this microblogging service has to do with the unfiltered access fans get to players and team personnel that you don’t receive on a medium such as Suns.com

At the same time, this access is a two-way street.  Now the Suns can see exactly what their fans are thinking 140 characters at a time.

“Team officials previously had to listen to talk radio, read message boards, etc. to get a true pulse of what the fans are thinking,” said Miller, who’s not afraid to bash the organization he’s loved all his life. “I think with Twitter, it gives the team a better comprehensive picture of how the fan base feels about the team.

“When running any business, especially a sports franchise, the voice of the customer (fan) is extremely important, and this gives the fans an outlet to express those feelings.”

The future of social media in the NBA

A year ago at this time, half the NBA couldn’t spell Twitter. Now we’re getting to the point where it’s odd if an NBA player does NOT use the microblogging service.

It’s the same story at the team level. Less than three years ago, a team as forward thinking as the Suns was afraid to delve into social media of any kind for fear it would take away from their featured online offering, Suns.com.

“I’ve been with the Suns 17 years, and when I started with the Suns we didn’t even have a Web site, so it’s amazing how fast things change in such a short amount of time,” McPeek said. “I think social media is just going to continue to grow. It’s going to slowly just evolve into becoming the media. It’s not going to be social media, it’s just going to be the media.

“That’s the way organizations and teams are going to communicate with fans and break news through social media, and I think there’s going to be a lot more interaction with the games themselves. “

In that vein the Suns plan to stream live tweets a couple times each game at the bottom of the TV screen and on the big screen and 360-degree LED rings at US Airways Center, McPeek said. This further encourages interactivity by allowing fans to tweet about the game from their couch or seat and immediately see these tweets pop up for all of Planet Orange to see.

Plus, this way everyone will know if @Amareisreal starts tweeting during a timeout.

“It would be really cool if we can have fans at home tweeting about the game and fans in the building itself tweeting about the game, and those tweets kind of merging together to be on display,” McPeek said.

As for the players, Peter Robert Casey said he would be surprised to learn that any NBA player is not engaging fans through social media in some fashion, be it Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. And he would know, because Casey has built a top-10 Twitter following (@Peter_R_Casey) in terms of NBA-related personalities with over 50,000 followers as a blogger, putting him ahead of luminaries such as Amare, J-Rich and Kevin Garnett.

“If Twitter is still a viable entity in a few years, the vast majority of the League will be tweeting away. Guaranteed,” Casey said. “I would expect to see a huge increase in player participation. And I don’t see it stopping at participation. NBA players are a creative bunch, and I think they’re capable of teaching the veterans a thing or two about engaging their fans.”

Due to the explosion of social media in the NBA world this offseason, David Stern is sure to put some rules in place, much like the NFL did by restricting social media usage from 90 minutes before kickoff until the end of postgame media sessions.

Yahoo! Sports reported that the NBA will unveil a similar policy that Stern described as “nothing too serious.” McPeek said the Suns are not working on a specific team policy aside from the league policy that the NBA has yet to finalize.

“Obviously, there is a happy medium between tweeting before the game and tweeting from our bench during the game,” Stern told Yahoo! Sports. “You want to make sure that pop culture doesn’t intrude on what brought us here, which is the game, and that we show the right respect for the game.”

But all that really means is that we will have to wait until the players get home before we hear about their postgame meal and what movie they’re watching to wind down from the game.

Social media is here and here to stay, and the players who embrace it will be the ones whose Q ratings will continue to soar.

“The future is now,” said Suns fan tweeter Julia Mak (@MissJulze). “All these tools, platforms and social media in general encourage real time communication and interaction between people. The media landscape is changing drastically and will continue to find ways to eliminate barriers in connecting people.

“People calling Twitter a fad are the ones that don’t actually use Twitter. Even if there is no Twitter, there will be similar technologies developed to enable communities of people to connect and communicate in real time.”

Back in the days when MJ ruled the Earth, he was the rock star and we could only get close to him by buying his cologne to smell like him.

Today, we have stars like Amare Stoudemire and Dwight Howard reaching out to us. They want us to follow them and fan them, and once in a while they will even reply back to us just so we know they’re there.

We now know how Jared Dudley spends his free time, and we can observe players conversing with each through social media as if we were a fly on the wall of a closed locker room.

Welcome to the NBA in 2009: Where interactivity happens.