I recently had a go at live twittering a conference and what a pain! First, I was flooding my followers with constant updates. Second, trying to recreate what I live twittered into a blog post was a nightmare, with me literally having to cut-and-paste newer twits above the older ones to reconstruct the proper chronology. There had to be a better way, and now there's one you can try: Live Twitting.

It came about after watching Lisa Barone trying to live twitter the Emetics Summit that just happened. I twittered to her that we needed better live twitting tools and that I was working up a blog post about the problem, in hopes someone would build something. I never got to the post. That's because Michael Jensen twittered back that he'd be happy to build a tool.

And so he did. I won't get into the nitty-gritty about how Live Twitting works. There's a tutorial that covers all the commands. The short story is that if you friend @livetwitting, you can then turn on a recording function that will assemble all your twitters into a single page. When you're done, you turn off recording, and that's it!

Commands are all sent through direct messages, so that you don't annoy your followers. Shortly, you can also choose to direct message your live twits, in case you don't want to flood your followers but like using Twitter as a recording tool. Or leave your live twits public, and you still have this as a nice recap tool.

While it's designed for conferences, you could use it for anything. Going to rant on a subject across six or seven twits? Give your rant a name, and you're off. Or my friend Todd Friesen does Train Talk With Todd on his commute, sharing thoughts on Twitter. He built his own site to archive those nightly, but you could use Live Twitting to do the same.

That's pretty much it. Have fun with the tool. I used it to live twitter a fake Super Heroes conference, and I'll be curious to see what others do. I'm at @dannysullivan if you want to twitter thoughts, but @mdjensen is the real guy to send the suggestions and improvement wishes too. I'm just happy he built it.

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