Listen! I know how digitized and rapidly changing our world has become. I live in New York. I am a new media analyst for a major telecommunications company. I co-write a blog.

In other words, I eat and drink the stuff our increasingly digital real-time media reality is made of. But ever so often, I am still amazed if not puzzled about how much the times they are a changin’.

The other day I had to check the Web site of what used to be my local savings bank back when I lived in Germany — a good fifteen years ago, no less.

Turns out, they’re now into Twitter. Yes, Twitter! I was stunned. The old-fashioned local savings bank of my childhood days is now condoning micro-blogging, for that purpose flaunting its very own Twitter account.

I am fully aware (and rather glad), that software generally doesn’t care about (artificially made-up) geographic boundaries, and easily transcends cultural and language barriers. Courtesy of Thomas L. Friedman, the world is flat, I agree.

But for my (at least back then) totally uncool, absolutely unhip, and likely still rather bureaucratic Stadtsparkasse to start endorsing free-flowing bit-size viral messaging – this caught me by surprise for a variety of reasons:

Worlds collide #1 – everyone’s a marketer

My first question is concerning about the actual tweets. What will my former local bank’s bite-size 140-character messages convey? And who’s “following”?

Well, my Stadtsparkasse organizers are promising “regular introduction to current products, interesting news and service offerings”.

Translation: Twitter seems relegated to the old one-way, broadcasting-style push messaging idea of getting advertising out to you and I.

But for tweets back to or about Stadtsparkasse, is anyone listening from inside my bank?

Remember, effective online marketing by now is a bi-directional thing — a dialog, not monologue, between marketers and audiences.

As David Morgan points out in his “The New Socialism”-themed OMMA Global 2009 redux: “… everyone is now media“. You, I, marketers – everyone! Not certain whether my Stadtsparkasse got that key point.

Anyway, for those of you interested in more about the still burgeoning micro-blogging trend, be sure to check out Jeff Pulver’s #140conf events and “The State of NOW” movement, enabling what one of his recent emails described as “Social Media Heterosis” — hybrid vigor in the social media space.

Worlds collide #2 – old barriers fade

Secondly, the bank’s site actually displays the Twitter logo and endorses click-thru directly into Twitter.com. No harm you think? So why mention it?

Remember, we are outside the US with this. Different cultures, different laws, presumably causing some Germany-side legal team to worry terribly about Twitter-related copyright issues and liability.

I could see, after what probably was a good bit of discussion between internal “old world” attorneys and the external “new world” agency (that likely pitched the whole idea in the first place), either one probably tried to actually get Twitter on the phone, so as to obtain the proper logo usage permission on the bank’s site.

Yet, the world’s largest and most popular micro-blogger at least until recently was run by thirty-or-so teenage software engineers, none remotely aware (or caring for that matter) about why someone far over in “old Europe” would seek legal permission to use a service that, by design, is open source – designed to be used by anyone anywhere in a decidedly “go-ahead-and-use-my-logo-a-plenty” kind of way.

All in, I am excited to see my good ‘ole bank discover Twitter, and with that, the larger micro-blogging trend.

Long live “the new socialism”. Work out the remaining kinks and you should be good to go.