Robin Hood Thrills, via Twitter, We Hope

The event is full of show stoppers. Last year, one of them was the laptops on the dinner tables displaying the night's menu and auction items.

Robin Hood Foundation's gala tonight is about 4,000 people getting together, including Jon Stewart, emcee, the Black Eyed Peas, who will perform, and dozens of names that appear in the business, culture, and celebrity pages. The number of volunteers alone is 200+, putting this event in a stratosphere of its own. Robin Hood is big, so big it's completely disorienting. The location aids in this feeling: the Javits Center isn't a familiar, well-worn fund-raising venue like the Waldorf. It feels like another planet.

When it comes to talking about size, lots of people will be focusing on how much money is raised -- usually leaps and bounds more than any other fund-raising gala in the city. Of course this year there's some apprehension. To aid on the money front, the gala is introducing live pledging via iml, meaning, guests can text in pledges without calling attention to themselves (a handy technology especially in these times when people are sensitive about flaunting wealth).

But we'd like to focus on a real potential growth area for Robin Hood: the number of followers it has for its brand-new Twitter account: #RobinHoodNYC. Only 23 since the account launched last week! As the White House Correspondents Dinner twitter action demonstrated, live tweets from tonight would be of great interest to the rest of us in New York City, so whoever you are updating, give us the blow by blow tonight and we'll do our part to get more people to follow. What we're looking for in particular: a little dish, along with stories about the impact the organization has on nonprofits in New York City: it helps more than 100 organizations fight poverty. Let's face it, there are enough stories to fill every minute of every day, so Twitter may really be an answer.