This year’s web 2.0 expo in San Francisco was all about twitter – not literally, but you certainly couldn’t ignore twitter this year whereas it was relatively insignificant at last year’s event.
As a recent twitter user (have had an account since last year’s expo but only started using it in the last couple of months), I find that I use it primarily to follow interesting information but it has absolutely no “social” value for me at this point. Largely because I do not have a network of friends who use it – at least for now. As a result, I would say I’m 99.9% information consumer and 0.1% contributor. I do actually post frequent updates but it’s unclear to me at this point if anyone reads them and, for the most part, they are not tweets that would be classified as useful. Still, much like this blog, I think that it’s important for me to take part to be involved in the technology and possibly even find new and different social interactions.
While I continue to play around with twitter on a day-to-day basis, it was at web 2.0 expo that I saw the value of twitter in a conference setting. By using the search feature, I continually tracked all tweets tagged as #w2e which gave me a real-time insight into the all the various goings on and commentary at and around the conference. Furthermore, most speakers used twitter along with a keyword/tag to take questions in real-time during their presentations. Of course this went further then simply questions and allowed people (including myself) to post supplementary information about a given topic to other attendees and/or make comments throughout. I found this to be extremely valuable and it allowed me to “virtually” attend certain sessions that I couldn’t get to.
The twitter eco-system is certainly evolving rapidly. It will be interesting to see where it goes. Will twitter become the facebook of 2006 in Toronto where, in a matter of weeks, the entire “connected” city opened accounts 2 years ago? in 2009, I believe the value and long-term viability of facebook is still unclear. Will twitter take the same uncertain path?
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