One year ago today, Gwen wrote about her wedding to Joel, the man she met on Twitter:

We’re going to live-stream video during the day. That means if you can’t physically be here for the wedding, you can still watch it. And participate remotely. We’ll have comments off on the live-stream in order to keep, ahem, naughtiness to a minimum. We’ll instead use a hashtag for Twitter to allow virtual guests to talk with us.

It was sometime in late-2008 between their engagement and the wedding plans when I first tweeted her. I forget the impetus other than it had something to do with my wondering about men and women who dated and chose to marry after meeting on Twitter. My only experience up to that point was fellow Bostonian Gradon Tripp and his Vancouver love, Meg Fowler. (You can read their perspectives about halfway down Mashable’s list of online romances.) Gwen and I clicked. I don’t remember why. Maybe because our fathers were gone. There was a mutual understanding of life’s preciousness; and for me, a curiosity how Gwen Bell and Joel Longtine met and their future together.

Life got in the way, social media took up a lot of it, and time passed.

In one of those out-of-the-blue moments, Gwen re-entered my life two weeks ago in the form of a blog comment on a guest post I wrote for Darren Rowse. The article was about why time away from Twitter is important. She commented that she had done something similar — and that led to her reducing her daily tweets to no more than five. I was amid my Twitter sabbatical at the time, and within days, I emulated her style.

As the below graph shows, my frequency over the first six days of February consists of an average 5.8 tweets per day.

Gwen has also inspired me to focus on reducing technology dependence, such as checking email more sporadically (or in her case, once a day).

In a separate conversation, Steve Rubel reminded me about a software application called RescueTime which tracks what types of websites I visit every day and if I am visiting, say, social networking sites too frequently and if I stipulate such sites are bad for me, then a timer pops up if I used the sites too much. My online dashboard shows a mixture of line and bar charts depicting my daily productivity and efficiency based on settings for allotted time on each type of site. I intend to create a streamcast of the program tomorrow for my Showcase Sunday post.

In any case, say hi to Gwen who I am sure will be posting a comment below. She won’t bite…at least not unless your name is Joel.

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