Benjamin Ellis & I spent Saturday at Tweetcamp. For those not in the know, Tweetcamp is an unconference all about Twitter, its uses and its implications. Around two hundred people spent the day talking about a wide range of subjects, from Real Time News to implications for Privacy, from how they personally use twitter to machines that tweet.
Before the event, we surveyed some of the participants using our on-line survey tool. Here are some highlights of what we found, taken directly from the survey report:
length of time on twitter
Whilst the majority of people there had been using twitter for over 3 years – almost as long as it has been around, there was also a significant spread of newer users, including some who were very, very new to Twitter. The range of experience lead to a very broad range of discussions, from the basics of how to use Twitter, to in-depth discussions about how it has changed as it has grown.
Hoping to meet someone in real life
Emphasising the way in which connections on Twitter have a habit of moving into the ‘real world’, three quarter’s of the attendees said that they hoped that tweetcamp would allow them to say ‘Hi’ to someone in real life that they already knew through twitter, and there seemed to be plenty of opportunity to do that during the course of the day, with a large open area and sessions in 8 or 9 breakout rooms. There were conversations everywhere.
What do you want to talk about?
People came with a massive range of things to talk about, as evidenced by this word cloud from the answers to one of the survey questions.
The thing I took away from this Tweetcamp, much like the first one in 2009, is how much services like Twitter are changing the way we work and live. The immediacy, the fact that everyone can now have their own platform to shout from, the speed at which news travels, and just how connected we all are, all add up to a rapidly changing world that the attendees at Tweetcamp were keen to discuss and debate. Today’s web is both real-time, and personal.