On Thursday I asked a really simple question on Twitter on a whim, “Quick Poll: What are the first 3 applications you fire up when you log in?” I got dozens of responses on both Twitter and Facebook … and it stunned me. This reminds me once again about what is right with Twitter for me personally — connectedness. To me the idea that I can shout a question into a 140 character text box and get something back from all sorts of people all over the place is a very interesting thought. There’s no need to take it any further … but I would love for you tell me why Twitter is important to you if care to share.

I took a little time to gather the results of the question (totally unscientific) below … note that I combined similar applications and tried to take into account things like gmail, google calendar, and other web-based productivity tools (that, as my Mother-in-Law reminded me, are applications). I also just lumped a bunch of stuff like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc into “Other” as there were a bunch of one-offs. The other thing to consider is that these are a percentage of the total responses — so while nearly every single person said a browser, they all almost all said email as well. So the chart is a bit misleading … I choose unwisely with that, but my data is at work and that’s life. BTW, my first launches are Mail, Safari, and Evernote (which no one else mentioned).

With about 60 responses accounted for.