There is a lot of twittering going on out there. I guess now that Oprah is tweeting (with nearly 120,000 followers after posting her first tweet only 4 hours ago), Twitter has officially become mainstream (you just can't get any more mainstream than Oprah). You can't buy a Fail Whale t-shirt at Target yet, but the mere fact that this image has become a pop culture icon illustrates just how popular Twitter has become -- especially since you don't actually see a Fail Whale unless the network is overloaded!
I've been meaning to post for the last week about my own experience with Twitter. I have been to two tech-oriented conferences in the past month or so, a regional Library Technology Conference in March, and MinneWebCon a week and a half ago. It's only rather recently that I have been able to bring a laptop computer with me to conferences, so it's still very much a novelty to me. (Judging by the number of people with Internet-capable devices on their laps or in their hands at MinneWebCon, I am probably among the last! ). Although handicapped somewhat by the umbilical cord of my power cable (the battery will not hold a charge for more than 5 seconds), I found that technology has enhanced my conference experience in some interesting ways. Not only does it allow me to take notes more efficiently than I could with pen and paper, the wonders of wifi allow me to connect to the Internet and immediately follow up on anything of interest that a speaker mentions (or occupy myself with any number of entertainments, if things get boring). It seems that live blogging is now passé. The latest trend is to tweet one's way through the day.
Using a "hashtag" (the # symbol), you can designate your tweets as related to a particular topic or event. For example, the hashtag #mwc09 was used by people attending MinneWebCon (also seems to have been adopted by some people attending Mobile World Congress this week). While it is possible to limit viewing of your tweets only to your followers, the vast majority of users keep the default setting which makes all your tweets public. Therefore, by monitoring Twitter for tweets with that hashtag, you could see a constant stream of chatter about the session, even from people you don't know.
Some tweets were reiterations of interesting things said by the speaker, and some raised questions or commented on the presentations or other aspects of the event. While many of these tweets were presumably for the benefit of that person's followers on Twitter, any marked with the #mwc09 hashtag could easily be found by anyone interested in the conference. To a certain extent, that made it possible to follow what was going on in sessions other than the one I was attending. It felt like the oddest combination of conversing and eavesdropping, mostly with people who were completely unknown to each other. Participants might be sitting just a few seats away from each other without realizing they were reading each other's tweets (though may have made each others' acquaintance later on at the bar during the "tweetup," which was, of course, announced using Twitter).
For me, the ability to carry on a sort of low-impact conversation in the background added a lot to my experience of the conference, but I got to wondering why Twitter was the medium of choice for this type of interaction. One problem is that your followers on Twitter receive all your tweets, not just the ones they are interested in. Unless your followers are all at the conference with you, they are likely to be baffled, if not annoyed, by a deluge of tweets about some event they know little or nothing about. In fact, if you read through the stream of #mwc09 tweets I linked to above, you would see several irate tweets from followers of conference participants asking what the heck #mwc09 is and why they should care. A chat room would seem to be a more efficient and effective way for conference participants to talk online, yet people were happy to use Twitter instead. Maybe it's precisely because of the public nature of the medium. People take a kind of secret pleasure in their ability to insert their thoughts into other people's lives -- kind of like an upscale version of writing on the bathroom walls.
Now excuse me while I tweet the fact that I just posted this.
UPDATE: Some folks in Europe recently published an academic paper on the use of Twitter at conferences.
Posted by ldfs at April 17, 2009 12:49 PM | TrackBack