I’m now convinced that Twitter’s killer app is conferences and other large scale in-person gatherings.
In Anaheim we organized meetups, kept tabs on concurrent sessions we couldn’t all attend, helped each other navigate the buildings, pointed out overlooked sessions, discussed sessions while they were going on, and even played a game.
I’ve conversed with a lot of the people I saw at ALA via twitter for a while now, and it was wonderful to put faces with names! And having a pre-formed group of people to coordinate with took a lot of the stress out of the conference for me. I spent less time wandering aimlessly and more time being productive.
The coolest example, for sheer scale, was when we organized a 10 person meetup at Disneyland on the fly, converging from tons of different locations, using nothing but twitter.
If twitter can get their stability issues under control before everybody jumps ship (which could unfortunately be any day now), it’ll be a wonderful thing. None of the replacement options out there seem to be quite as right for this kind of environment. So I’m crossing my fingers that we’ll be using twitter at ALA ’09.