27.Nov.2008 Twitter conference app view
I have been to two conferences recently where the twitter conference backchannel turned out to be as important as the event itself. The two in particular were Social Media Camp London 08 - #smclondon08 and Future of Mobile - #fom.
At these events the real time conversations provide a deep layer of interactivity with the organisers, speakers, fellow attendees and ‘virtual’ attendees. This results in being able to see instant feedback as to how the crowd is reacting as well as further exploring subjects mentioned in presentations.
Apps I have used to tweet away to my heart’s content during a conference have included:
Now the problem I found was whilst all the apps have been very good, they were not great for following and replying quickly within the conference backchannel. I find that they all have the same issue, you have to switch between 2 views one is your twitter home view to send updates and the other is the search view. Now this can present problems to the avid conference attendee who likes to tweet updates like their life depends on it, it requires a lot of jumping about to follow the thread and then reply to it.
What I’d like to see is a new ‘conference view’ it would break down into two sections – the top section would contain space to enter an update and the bottom section would contain the conference feed which would update in realtime.
I’ll get into a little more detail and feel free to correct me as I am not a prgrammer/designer and have no idea whats in the twitter api, but in the spirit of Web 2.0 I don’t see why that should hold me back, I therefore give you twitconf:
Like Twitter but at a conference man!
Okay so there might be an issue with the api limit that requests can be made of a user’s account. Well my stab in the dark is that we avoid that by using two communications from the twitconf page, it would play out like this (please click on the picture link and peruse my magnificent drawing before continuing):
- The updates box uses the standard api calls to tweet from the user’s account
- The hashtag box prepopulates the updates box and the message count for the updates box is worked out as 140 characters minus the hashtag length. The hashtag box also provides the search string for search.twitter.com
- The results of the search.twitter.com are displayed in the largest box on the page and this can be done using standard http request thus not affecting the api call limit and allowing you to have a real-time experience of the conference backchannel.
