Will Twitter ‘Black Hole’ A Conference This Year
One of things I’ve always joked about is that at some point, there will be a conference where nobody takes any pictures, relying instead on the ‘herd immunity’ concpet that someone else will be Flickring anything interesting. And everyone decides to rely on everyone else, the pictorial record of a conference will vanish into a modern day black hole.
Given the mass adoption of Twitter at SXSW Interactive, I’m wondering if it won;t be a pictorial black hole, but a bloggable black hole. Most tech conferences have everyone blogging thoughts, feelings, news and other minuate throughout the day. I’ll wager that compared to other conferences, there’s been a 60%-70% drop in blog posts, but the thoughts haven’t been lost, they’ve all migrated over to Twitter.
Launched at SXSW last year, it would be fair to say that Twitter passed it’s tipping point in the first few hours of SXSW 2007, and usage has hockey sticked. Everyone here has been using it, there’s a bundle of Twitter jokes, and new techniques such as ‘twitterati,’ ‘twitter-bait’ and ‘twittching’ are in the air. But it means that a huge amount of people’s thoughts are in stream of concious, SMS style archives, rather than indexed, tagges, and searchable blogs.
As Eric Rice points out, it’ll be intersting if these in-depth blog posts reappear after SXSW, or if the moment has past. Will we have twitter-fade? Will ETech have this same depreciation in blog posts? ANd if I want these thoughts read, should I blog it, or twitter it (or twitter a tinyurl.com to here)
A new definition for the ‘in’ crowd. I wonder how far into the center of the circle people can [or think they can] see?
excellent – must use this for further research… you just made my day – hope those austin cabbies are making you smile *s*
Is this the end of inclusivity? If everyone who knows everyone is twittering away, where is the conversation for “the rest of us?” Man, if this scene gets anymore exclusively self-referential I’ll be skypeing myself!
[...] importantly, can they make the jump without people jumping to a federated version? A few years ago, SXSW was the making of Twitter – now it looks like their finances could be the biggest talking point of the Austin [...]