Sat 31 May 2008
Last Thursday I went to the second Triangle Tweetup, held at C[Capstrat]], a local media agency. It was quite a nice location, though we did fill it with the 60+ twitterers who showed up. As always @waynesutton did a great job of organizing interesting presentations, among which were:
Twitter Movie Reviews, a cool app by @JazzyChad that aggregates twitter movie comments to catch the vibe about a movie.
My thoughts:Pretty Hip, but I can probably get the same info by just listening to my feed, many trends seem to emerge from small groups and be echoed by the masses. Aside from that, I know which of my friends to trust on this front. Listening to the masses might end up with me watching the next jackass movie, no thanks. Either way, it is a great way to show the power of twitter to find what has buzz and what the crowd likes - crowd sourcing at it’s most pure.
The big downfall I saw to this tool was that it was almost completely manual, and that just won’t scale. However, Chad seems to be on top of getting things automated, if he can sort that out he may be able to branch out to other areas instead of just movies. What about restaurants, hotels, vaca spots, or products. There could be money to be had here…- The latest in media devices from @shepherdfx (Francis Shepherd). This was a review of the latest in mics and cameras mostly at the pro and semi pro level. Quite interesting to see where the market is going.
My Thoughts: All this stuff is out of my price range, but it’s great to see everything is getting cheaper and cheaper, which means it could be in my price range soon. - @critter, the local colorful twitterer, did a presentation on C[seesmic]]. I think Critter actually talked about this at the last tweetup as well. This time however, the app has grown more into its own, and I now better understood that it is more about interactive movie chat. Like a video twitter. A huge improvement is that there are threads.
My Thoughts: I don’t do much video chat, it feels like the futuristic world that every wonk was predicting 20 years ago. It’s not that it isn’t a cool site, I’m just not hip to video posts yet. Maybe I’ll try it out soon, if I did, it would definitely be at seesmic, the site is slick and looks quite easy to use. - C[brightkite]] - cool or annoying?
A lot of people have picked up on brightkite, a site that lets you broadcast your location in a twitteresque way. So twitterlike, that you can have it actually feed into twitter as well. A smooth integration that many were quick to jump on. The downside of this is that people are now getting spammed with everyone’s location, most of the time I don’t care that much, and many of the people aren’t remotely near me. Besides that, the locations are in address form, some one could be 50 feet away from me, but I wouldn’t know because I am horrible with street names.
It’s a cool site, geolocal twitter, neato, but I think it still has some work to do before it is truly answering a pain. - What if twitter goes down… I mean for good
What will we all do?! Ok, it’s not that bad, but a common reply was “Get work done!” Sad but true. Pownce was brought up, a common complaint being that no one is there - not so true if twitter is dead. I threw IRC out there, because often times the only difference between the two is I’m a little more trigger shy on twitter. - @jessmartin mentioned that C[Startupweekend]] is coming to the triangle, with a background of coding and a love for startups, this sounds pretty enticing.
- Would C[brightkite]] be better if it were built into the phone, I see the possibility of more great innovations with android coming. Side note, why the heck did apply ruin the iPhone by stifling innovation and not allowing third party developers free reign? If it were built right in then I would have to do anything to tell people where I am, GPS coords could be sent back automatically, and if a friend is within X meters I could be automatically notified.
The question was asked whether or not twitter should do this. Some argued that part of its essence is simplicity and that features like that would muddy it. I agree that the simplicity is key to bringing in new people and getting them addicted. I think the real challenge with any product is adding new features without adding complexity. Twitter’s vision isn’t clear, they may stay 140 char text box or they may branch out, only time will tell. - Will twitter sell?
Will they sell, or maybe the better question is after which milestone will they sell? Some postulated that they need to prove the monetary value of a user first, has facebook done that - I’m not sure. A good question was asked here, what if they try to make some money but do a bad job, because it’s not their specialty and by doing so falsely generate a lower valuation. Perhaps they won’t try at all. - SMS marketing on mobiles
I think this will take off in USA at some point, but several people brought up not wanting to be spammed. I think if it’s done right it will be more like a service than advertising. C[APML]] (I believe this is what people said) was brought up as a good start to making sure this was done right. Definitely a sticky bit that needs to worked out, exciting! - How to start using twitter corporately
I mentioned that I had obtained a few twitter names for Bronto, but that I haven’t done anything with them yet, since I haven’t figured out the route I want to go. @Justis said that was a great idea, think it through before you start a feed that is useless, confusing, or just not a good reflection of your company. Good point. Also, make sure to grab your company’s name and any variations on any new social network right away or some one else will, even if you’re not sure what you’ll do with it yet.
After the presentations we had some group chat, I didn’t take notes, but here are some major convos I recall:
After that the group mostly split up and headed over the bar Capstrat has across the hall (sweet!), some great conversations where had there as well, here’s a bit of what I took part in:
Other tidbits that got thrown around: Why C[Bronto]] is so cool (shameless plug, I know), how to open a beer bottle with your ring, SAS has great benefits, and I need to get into Raleigh for beers with @jefftippett and @Dimambro, among many many others.
Then we got tossed out at 10:00 so the Capstrat folks could go home. A fun night of stimulating conversation spent with some hip local people. After a couple years down here, I’m definitely starting to understand why the triangle is such a great place to live.
