I am writing this as I'm flying back from the 140 character conference in New York where I've had two great days with Jeff Pulver (@jeffpulver) and a fantastic cast of characters. This conference was different from many other conferences. Jeff managed to gather a great variety of people who had different uses for and experiences from twitter.
Starting with two legendary people in social media, Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly media (@timoreilly) and Jack Dorsey founder of Twitter (@jack), the conference continued peaking with an interview with Wyclef Jean (@wyclef) and a panel on twitter for news gathering for traditional media that included Ann Curry of NBC (@anncurry) and Rick Sanchez of CNN (@ricksanchezcnn). Ann Curry was absolutely fantastic on that panel. Both sessions can be watched at videos on the 140conf site.
Other favorites from the conference include Laura Fitton's (@pistachio) Love Story, Israel's use of Twitter for public diplomacy (@davidsaranga), the video blogging panel and the social media for social change panel with inspirational people like @drew (#blamedrewscancer), Liane Thomson (@missilecitykids), @amanda (Twestival) and @StaceyMonk (Epic Change). For more techy or geeky stuff, you might like Kevin Slavin's talk about things that tweet and for the talk with the most f-words, check out Chris Weingarten's (@1000timesyes) brilliant talk.
Interesting topics that weren't covered but might be covered on the next 140conf were twitter for travel and more on twitter for marketing. If I were to say in two or three sentences what the outtake of the conference was, I would say it was this:
* Many people shared their rules on what was accepted and what not on Twitter - and they contradict each other. That tells us Twitter is only a tool and every man has to make his own rules on how to use Twitter most effectively. I'll write another post tomorrow on my view on the different rules.
* Twitter is changing the world, 140 characters at the time. The fundamental change is that things are now happening in real time. We can follow events and opinions developing as they happen. And we can use twitter search and hashtags to follow those events. This is influencing business, news gathering, politics, celebrities and pretty much all levels of communications.
The events in Iran and the use of twitter to organize the demonstrations in Tehran was a very fresh issue. Two discussion that were taking place in the hallways and on twitter was if people should be changing their location to Tehran to show support and make it difficult for the Iranian government to track those on location who are using twitter, or if it was obscuring the news and which news were from authentic saurces and which not.
Another discussion was about the green avatars but people are turning their avatars green to show support for fair elections in Iran. That effort has been criticised for being useless but as @anamariecox puts it:
You can watch videos from the conference at http://140conf.com/watch. And here is my own talk on "How I Became a Twitter Character", as Jonny Goldstein (@jonnygoldstein) expressed it in his visual notes:
More of Jonny Goldstein's visual notes from the conference can be seen on his in his 140conf set on his Flickr account.
Jeff is planning two other 140 character conferences, one in London Nov. 10th.-11th. and one in Los Angeles in October. There's an open call for speakers if you'd like to see someone speak, or have a story to share.
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