I attended the GeoWeb 2009 conference and one of my “takeaways” didn’t have anything to do with geography or the geoweb at all (directly, anyway).
I noticed that at each session, some dozen or so attendees were typing away at their laptops or iPhones. I assumed they were just taking notes, but when I peered closer over their shoulder(s) I realized they were tweeting. I had my new Palm Pre with me, and had signed up a few weeks before for a Twitter account, so I investigated further. (At the time I was using the @oasisnycmaps handle, though I’ve added another one since then — and maybe there’ll be more, read on!)
Each of them were adding the #geoweb or #geoweb2009 hashtags to their tweets, so I could easily search and see all of the commentary. Mainly they were posting comments about whatever session they happened to be attending. But then they were also commenting on each other’s tweets, retweeting, and posting detailed feedback (like Anthony Beck’s neat MindMaps). It was a multi-way, simultaneous, interactive, Twitter-ized conversation among attendees across different sessions and even in the same session. Cool.
Btw, my sense of Twitter vs. FB/FF, given the recent acquisition, is that it’s somewhat apples and oranges. To me (relative newbie), Facebook is “personal social” (updates on all manner of personal idiosyncracies) while Twitter is more apt for “professional social”, based on my experience at GeoWeb and since then following people in my professional space.
Anyway, I’m hooked. I’ve added a Twitter handle (SR_spatial — though maybe I’ll drop the underscore, that seems to be the conventional wisdom) and started a blog (this one!). Looking forward to diving into this brave new virtual world (but with quite tangible utility in the real one).
Filed under: Social networking Tagged: | GeoWeb, Twitter
