Twitter, a useful Communication Tool of SXSW

Above: Twitter is being promoted at SXSW conference as an encouraged communication channel. You can watch this screen live, and hear the voices and thoughts of SXSW Attendees in real time. (link from Paul)

As you may know, I’ve cut out Instant Messaging completely out of my life, I found it too disruptive and distracting. I think I may have found a better tool, that’s less invasive and puts the user in control.

A lot of folks are using twitter here at SXSW, if you’re not familiar with it, it’s an online and mobile chat room, where you can add (or remove) the contacts you prefer. It’s a social network, where individuals can share their status, location, or communicate directly with others. Since this is an opt in and opt out model, there should be more difficulty for marketers to spam the site, or users will remove them.

Here’s why I like Twitter:

Puts me in charge

Mobile Hooks

Web based

not invasive, not disruptive

Synchronous and asynchronus communication

I can choose my contacts

Scalable: RSS, mashups, etc

Eddie Codel and I cruised to some of the tech gatherings last night, and we were using Twitter to check the status of our shared contacts to find out where things were happening. Other folks are using this tool as well as text messaging to find out where people are. Eddie commented that last year, Dodgeball was all the rage, and now it’s seemed to have moved to Twitter.

You can add me as a Twitter contact, my profile is live on the web as well as the chatter of my preferred network.

Attention Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, and others. It will be interesting how this early adopters of this tool will spread to mainstream, and then to the enterprise space.

Update: It’s amazing how many folks came up to me today and said they read my twitter messages about how bad the bed is at the hotel, amazing.

(Shelbinator has an interesting analysis, looking at Twitter from a different point of view, worth a read.

Check out what Ross Mayfield says about Twitter, he suggests we’re reaching a critical mass

Chris Brogan has written a helpful “ways to use Twitter” usecases for LifeHack)

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 10th, 2007 at 8:57 am and is filed under Mobile, Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.