My foray into truly using Twitter began less than 1 month ago when I attended the meeting SDForum:Shaping the age of application development. Rather than just take notes in MS Word or by pen, I used my laptop to tweet significant and interesting anecdotes and comments by the presenters and panelists to my list of followers. Naturally there were others in the room tweeting as well and by using the hashtag #sdforum (see more info on twitter search operators). This ensured that all the tweets could be easily accessed in one location. Using the Tweetdeck I monitored the tweets and retweets that took place and noticed that it gave a reasonable account of what was happening at the meeting. When I returned home that evening, I pull together my tweets (I had installed TwitterTools, a Wordpress plugin that creates a post automatically out of my tweets/and retweets) into a blog post. Looking back today at my post, even with the benefit of being the author of the tweets, some of them barely make enough sense to be of value. Observation #1 – Tweets from a meeting/conference appear to make the most sense and add the most value within a certain period of their real-time delivery.
Last week I went in person to the Churchill Club Top Ten Tech Trends event and this time, instead of tweeting, I took notes the old fashioned way by pen and later re-posted it as a blog entry. Interestingly there are many speculating, due to the real-time nature of Twitter, that blogging is dead. At the event, Jason Pontin one of the moderators, said to the crowd ,”for those of you tweeting, you little freaks, please use the hashtag #CHC”. In fact, on my drive home from the event, I chatted to my friend Wasim Ahmad who had been “virtually attending” the meeting by monitoring the #CHC tweet stream. As I played back my thoughts of the event, he seemed to have understood much of the conference and commented that it was “just like being there”. When he read my blog post the next day, he remarked on how it furthered his experience of the meeting, and clarified points that he missed or misunderstood. Observation #2 – A good blog post (non-tweet based) can supplement the tweets digested to round out the virtual conference/event experience.
Yesterday I decided to multi-task and while working on other projects, kept one eye on the Forrester IT Forum being held in Las Vegas via the #FIT09 tweet stream. I got to experience for myself “virtual participation”which provided a tremendous amount of real-time detail. So much so that I gave a “shout out tweet” to those most active: “Tweets frm #FITF09 while in San Fran is like being there Thx @drnatalie, @akarlin, @kcaretta @lauraramos and more. Now if I can get $1 on 8 for roulette.” In the end, I got my project completed and felt like I also got the “TweetlitesTM“ (tweetlites.com) a term I am officially coining today to describe the act of tweeting highlights from a conference or meeting . Observation #3 – You can get stuff done, while virtually attending a meeting by monitoring “Tweetlites”
In a future post, I’ll have some additional thoughts on best practices for Tweetlites.