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.
