Tony Thomas

I spent a great day at MinneWebCon yesterday talking with and meeting other folks in the industry at The Big U where I work and elsewhere.

It was really a good event for those of us in Minneapolis who are interested in current and emerging web technology. The interesting this to me is how much Twitter added to the experience for those of us participating.

If you weren’t monitoring things on Twitter, you really missed out on an ongoing conversation. The most obvious observation is that there was a general air of excitement about the event and a lot of people were merely expressing that sentiment in real time. That had one benefit: I was able to get a sense of what was happening in sessions that I was not attending. At least once it influenced my decision to bail out of one session in favor of another.

The second, perhaps more valuable thing about Twitter at the event was a stream of continuous feedback. We were not 30 seconds into the conference before someone was commenting on the @klayon‘s introduction. Tracking “#minnewebcon” from my cell phone was like having an ear to the wall. The best part about that? The organizers of the event responded directly to me about a couple of comments I made. They were paying attention and that’s important.

There will be more formal methods for providing feedback in the next few days, but if you want to troubleshoot the problems in real-time and address them, Twitter is your friend.