Conference attendees are no strangers to Twitter; it’s used to disseminate information, organize gatherings, and sometimes let out heartfelt emotion. Tapping into that pulse of information is a great way to create a clear and hyper realistic view of your attendee consciousness. The widely used “Twitter Wall” concept, projecting a twitter based feed on a wall or giant screen, has been demonstrated at many different events and conferences. This week, my quest for new and evolving technologies has me thinking about the next stages of the Twitter wall concept.
One of the more creative displays I have come across is Almost.at, seen below, which resembles the offspring of iTunes and a slot machine. Simply choose an event listed on the left navigation, and watch the “reels” populate with tweets, photos, and links surrounding an event. Scroll bars make it easy to roll back, or pause the flow of information. By gathering information outside the Twitter landscape, it is able to paint a broader picture of event or topic currently being shown. The current beta stage does not allow for custom searching of events, however you may submit your event with the hopes that the moderator adds you to the navigation bar. I will be keeping an eye on this one as it develops further.
Falling into the easy to use category, is TwitterFall. Although solely relying on a Twitter feeds, this easy to customize display allows you to quickly display trends and hash tags, creating a wall that literally rains tweets. The right hand navigation allows quick and easy customization of the display- speed, font size, themes, and animations are just a few of the controllable features. With one click at the top, the customization panes are hidden and you are ready to fire up the projector. While TwitterFall is not the most cutting edge of technologies, I believe it has the foundation to grow and incorporate more information. Great usability is always a pathway to adoption.
After researching a few more twitter wall apps, my thirst was just not quenched. I may have to tap our web resource and see about creating a mash up Twitter wall for the Cisco Live conferences. I would like to see a wall that includes tweets, live video, photos, and can be tailored to fit the theme of the event. If this mash-up does come to fruition, I will most definitely have a new blog post about it!
Have you interacted with a twitter/sms wall in the past? Did you feel the experience added to your connection with the overall conference?
Speaking of twitter integration, Cisco Live Virtual is planning a new and improved live webcast console, which will feature live twitter back-feeds. More information to come, as we get closer to Cisco Live 2010 @ Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas!
Side note: As the newest member to the Virtual Environments blog, I will be will be blogging about the evolution of hybrid events, webcast technologies, social media integration, and virtual collaboration tools. Follow me on Twitter @CiscoLive_Dan
Greetings Dan and welcome to…er, your own blog
I’m looking forward to future postings from you.As a technology provider for live events, I have been gently forced into knowing as much as possible about social media integration/hybrid meetings.I think one of the key factors is not so much the platform for the technology as the availability and awareness. If we have a client who is open to the concept, we place as many flat panel displays as possible in an event environment…in general sessions, breakout rooms, foyers, etc. (Although no restrooms as of yet) We’d like to enhance the experience by using touch-screen displays that allow participants to click-through to links/videos on the monitors as well as the sponsor links on the same display. This provides interactivity, immediate gratification and – perhaps most importantly – data tracking for sponsors and your marketing folks!Another key feature of these displays is closing the gap between the active co-creators and the passive attendees who see social media as a product of hem”" and “”they”". Visualizing the media helps them make the connection between their fellow attendee (both remote and live), event organizers, speakers and content around them.I’m excited to see future developments from almost.at We frequently use http://www.visibletweets.com It’s very, very simple but clean and easy to see on a large-scale display. The only drawback is the lack of customization, which gives wiffiti.com an edge. Of course, this platform has its own issues too (mostly reliability).Anyways, here’s to continued conversation!Midori Connolly, Chief AVGirlPulse Staging and Events, Inc.http://www.twitter.com/GreenA_V“
Midori-Thanks for your welcoming and informative post! I agree, closing the gap between the media stream and the physical attendees will only increase the their connection to the overall event. I like your idea regarding touchscreens, what a great way to allow attendees to interact in real time with the social and virtual attendees. Along those lines, I would also like to see these social displays take advantage of location aware devices, effectively welcoming you to the collaboration areas with some kind of on-screen profile picture. Thanks for introducing me to VisibleTweets.com, what a natural fit for this post. The visuals are entertaining and very creative, I can see this adding some dramatic effects to a show floor. thanks again-Dan
I really like the concept at almost.at, what a cool creative way to display it! Thanks for sharing
Great post! I’ve noticed that twitter love towards open source can help programmers across the globe to actively participate and grow with twitter projects and jobs. Right now twitter have listed few of the available projects done in Ruby, Scala, Java and C/C++ languages. Without just that, twitter also added up its job opportunities when we do great projects in the crowd. The engineering blog of twitter gives more info on the recent announcements on this.
Daniel,Thanks for so much great information in this post. I agree that I would help some events to close the gap between actually being there and reading someone’s tweets from the event. Good luck,-Stew
Thank you for this informative post Daniel. I can see utilizing trends and hash tags to it’s fullest extent, enhancing the results of the group is the main objective, and TwitterFall achieves just that. Coming full circle from the original TweetDeck.
Nice to see something has changed in the world of app development…for the better, finally.