Bill Gates and his The Gates Notes website

You might wonder what does a man considered as one of the world’s richest, who revolutionized computing and is regarded as one of the pillars of today’s software and internet technology do in the “online” world?

Well, this week, Bill Gates was just like the most of us – rejoined Facebook (well, you can be a fan of his Facebook Page), opened an account in Twitter, and, yes, launched his personal website.

Bloggista’s “Website in Focus” this week is  The Gates Notes – Bill Gate’s website which he will use to let people know what’s going on in his world.

The Gates Notes website pops up a welcome message which read:

“Since leaving my full-time job at Microsoft to dedicate more time to our foundation, a lot of people have asked me what I’m working on,” wrote Gates as a welcome message on his new site. “It often feels like I’m back in school, as I spend a lot of my time learning about issues I’m passionate about.

I’m fortunate because the people I’m working with and learning from are true experts in their fields. I take a lot of notes, and often share them and my own thoughts on the subject with others through email, so I can learn from them and expand the conversation.

I thought it would be interesting to share these conversations more widely with a Website, in the hope of getting more people thinking and learning about the issues I think are interesting and important.”

Bill Gates used his Twitter account to spread the word about his new website. The day after he joined Twitter, he sent a tweet “My new website is live check out www.thegatesnotes.com. Excited to share more about what I’m learning, hope you like it!

I immediately checked the site, and indeed it was new – with no Alexa Rank whatsoever (this is one of the tools used  in measuring a website’s traffic and popularity. The lower the Alexa rank number, the popular is a site. Google has an Alexa rank of 1).

Now here’s the part where every common mortal blogger would envy Bill – in just two days, The Gates Notes broke the 1 million Alexa barrier (from 28 million or no Alexa Rank the previous day. After 4 days, the Alexa traffic rank is below 300K and is close to breaking the 100K Alexa rank barrier – a dream rank of every blogger on earth, I suppose.

On January 19, 2010, twitland got this tweet - “Hello World.” Hard at work on my foundation letter – publishing on 1/25. And it was from an account twitter.com/billgates.

Succeeding tweets were all about the aid and fund-raising campaign for Haiti, starting from a retweet of Ryan Seacrest’s tweet on a fund campaign with CNN the previous night. Then Ryan Seacrest twitted – “It’s official, Bill Gates is on Twitter.”

This is where Bloggista learned about Bill Gate’s twitter account so after checking on it – only 2 hours from joining, he already amassed more than 30,000 followers. And I was one of them. Refreshing it every 5 seconds, more than a thousand more have followed him. 4 days later Bill Gates already have 313,000 followers and still growing…

Bill Gates shares on The Gates Notes the things he and wife Melinda do with their Gates Foundation. He also discusses his thoughts on various topics like Climate Change, Social Issues, Technology, Agriculture, Education, Development, Energy and Global Health.

Certainly, Bill Gate’s personal website and his use of Social Media will let him connect with the rest of the earthlings and seems there’s still a lot to learn even if you’re the top tech guy and rich man in the universe. As what he said in his tweet -

“Thanks to you and all the other people who have welcomed me. I’ve got a lot to learn about Twitter but look forward to sharing more.”

Now, this lesser mortal blogger is on Twitter and has a Facebook fan page too. Add me up, why not? LOL…