A week ago we set out our stall to provide live tracking of EdTwestival socialising as it happened.
The idea was to do this using a newly created Twitter account @wemet. By sending a direct message to WeMet with the Twitter @names of the people you met, you would help to create a real time database of all the social interactions as they happened.
That was the theory…
In practice in turned out pretty well. The EdTwestival event itself was an unqualified success – well organised, well supported and much appreciated by all who attended. By comparison the live tracking element was more of a mixed bag.
What worked
- Roy, Andy and Fraser did a grand job in a short space of time to grapple with the Twitter API, develop the application and sort out the front end interface.
- Excellent support for the idea ahead of the event from the EdTwestival team and the “community”.
- At the event itself there was a generous spirit and plenty of good intentions to participate in the idea.
- In the end, from a universe of 189, a total of 58 people sent direct messages detailing conversations with 118 others. These “meetings” involved 124 unique names or 66% of the universe. The resulting social graph of the event is shown in the image above and the movie below. You can also view a replay, condensed into 5 minutes, here.
What could have been better
- Despite the best efforts of the EdTwestival guys the venue wifi couldn’t cope with demand for bandwith resulting from the furious content creation of 200 avid twitter-bloggers. We ended up running the application through a 3G dongle that could only manage a 2G connection.
- A design that looked great on screen could have been better optimised for large scale projection.
- Despite the predictably high penetration of iPhones within this geeky group, many people simply weren’t packing the right kind of mobile devices to make participation easy.
- Even with an iPhone, sending a direct message at the start of every new conversation is actually an anti-social act. In the end, an idea that was enabled by technology was also limited by technology. More accurately, and reassuringly, the idea was limited by people’s desire to be socialising rather than technologising.
Nonetheless a big thank you to all who did “technologise”.
To retweet this post, copy and paste the text below into Twitter, Tweetdeck, Tweetie, Twhirl, or twhatever.
Results of Wemet live tracking at #EdTwestival – http://bit.ly/yblG3
Tags: API, edinburgh, edtwestival, linkedin, mobile, tracking, twestival, Twitter, visualisation, wemet
February 13th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Thanks very much for the experiment, and sharing the results.
I did enjoy seeing some of the connections flying across the screen, but it was a bit too time consuming to stop and send the direct message – esp if you were talking to someone for the first time, or just chatting to them on the stairs or at the bar.
It also made me realise how tricky it is to get people’s twitter names spot on (esp for people who have tricky names) – I get used to replying to people on twitter so don’t need to remember or type out their names.
February 13th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
First up congratulations with what you did – really looked impressive!
I posted a few wemets but as you say, it does become a bit anti-social and in the end I think most of us just ended talking to each other.
I did have one thought (please bear in mind that I’m not a programmer so this could be completely off the wall) but wondered if you could do something using QR codes? Each person could have a personal QR code on their badge, together with their Twitter name. As I guess that most people would have phones with cameras and I think that you can get the app for quite a wide range of phones…. thought tails off at this point but you get the idea. Maybe you can do something with it!
Pauline aka @virtualewit
February 13th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
I’ve saved a screen shot of the final fireworks display. It looks absolutely beautiful and will be my screen saver for quite a while.
February 13th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
Oi, you lot at Blonde:
An authentic, honest and refreshingly candid post.
But now of course, you’ve shattered an illusion.
I thought all digital/ad/pr agencies were perfect, “chuff-up free” zones.
Masters of the “It was nae me” defence.
Paragons of perfection in all things.
And now you’ve gone and spoiled it all, by the heretical suggestion that sometimes people don’t get things bang-on first time. That there are risks involved in doing something great/different/worthwhile/brave.
For my part: “Result”, says I.
“Failing but falling forward fast”, “Faint heart never won a fair Sailor”, “You don’t give you don’t get” (insert favorite cliche here) etc, etc,
What’s important is that Blonde put their enthusiasm, evangelism, expertise and money, where their mouth, (and Twitter’s API) is.
Blonde are one of the few digital agencies, (can I call you that), among a very select few who really ‘get’ social media in Scotland. While the majority just talk a good Web 2.0 game, but don’t really understand it, worse still; don’t really engage in it, and wish to God they could have just carried on building fat, flabby web sites.
So top marks for WeMet for giving it a go.
And even more kudos to you for supporting Twestival in all the ways you did from the get-go.
I hope your contribution, support and creativity isn’t forgotten or overlooked.
Particularly by your clients, who should be proud of you.
And your competitors, who should be intimidated by you.
February 13th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
Great post and you hit the nail on the head. I was so busy talking to people I didn’t send a single tweet all night – you’re right, it would have been anti-social. Not that I’m making a comment on those who did – they were helping out with the project and had the right intentions. I was just having way too much fun to take my iPhone out of my pocket.
February 14th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
Thank you for the nice comments. If you don’t mind I’ll post a collective reply.
I’ve got a series of blog posts in my head based on my first year at Blonde. They were meant to fall under the theme of “A year in digital”, but we’re at thirteen and a half months and counting as I write this.
Having come from an advertising background I’ve noticed (nay been assaulted by) several significant differences between the worlds of offline and online.
One of the biggest is the generosity of spirit that seems to be common to most people in the digital community. This generosity and open-ness seems to be the engine for a lot of what works well – just look at Slideshare, delicious and indeed Twitter itself.
I don’t think we’d have tried the WeMet thing on a more cynical ad crowd, but we could afford to be optimistic with Twestival goers. And that optimism wasn’t misplaced as it turns out.
As for us, we put in a reasonable amount by way of design and development time.
But it was fun. And the general feeling at Blonde is that, in terms of profile before during and after, we probably got more than our fair share. By comparison the likes of Jim and Kirsten and the rest of the organising committee probably deserve even more recognition than they’ve had to date.
To deal with specifics, we talked about QR codes but, without any kind of insight as to the penetration of appropriate phones or relevant apps, we were less confident about this route than we were with direct messaging. Plus there was a nice symmetry to using Twitter to monitor socialising at a Twitter event.
Another thing that I should have put in the post is that we could have made the badges themselves clearer as well. Live and learn.
Thanks again for the lovely, supportive comments. They’re much appreciated.
Cheers
Phil
February 15th, 2009 at 12:37 am
They way I tried to shorten the typing issue was having @wemet as a location on my Twibble on the N95.
February 16th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Thanks for WeMet and the blog posting above!
I found WeMet easier in theory than in practice partly because of the antisocial element but partly also because the dark room mixed with the lovely but dark badges made it tough to see correct spellings or full badges easily. In an ideal world (where phone were QR friendly as in Japan) it would have been better to have a QR code associated with badges so you would only have had to zap the code rather than type all the details in when you wanted to DM a wemet. Some sort of offline way to store those DMs when the wifi was ropey would also have been good but that’s a Twitter not a Blonde issue I think…