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Sunday, 21 June 2009

Watching conference tweets in real time - how best?

There are probably an unlimited number of ways of following real time Twitter messages during a conference.

The ones I know of and have played with include:
  • Twitter search - search for the relevant tag and refresh periodically to bring up the latest messages
  • Monitter.com - add search term to one of the columns and sit back and watch it scroll with latest messages (auto update) - this one seems to be a drain on computer resources though
  • Twitterfall - similar to Monitter, real time (can vary the speed at which Tweets appear)
  • FriendFeed - can be used in a variety of ways and is generally my favourite
For the science communication conference I've created a FriendFeed room which has a feed taken from Twitter. It's been set up so that every time someone writes scc2009 or #scc2009 in a Tweet then that Tweet will be sent to the room (unless their Twitterstream is private, in which case it won't).

The problem is that each Tweet has lots its 'owner' - there's no indication who said it and everything is re-badged as coming from the SCC2009 room. This is fine if you just want to see what's being said but not that great if you want to see who said it.

How can I amend the settings to fix this, or can this not be done? Should I have done something else ;)

All of the other three methods maintain the 'so and so said' connection. Can't understand why the FriendFeed room - which is taken from the Twitter search (which does maintain the connection) - loses who said what.

Compare the pictures on the left hand side of the pages to see what I mean:
http://friendfeed.com/scc2009
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23scc2009

Any ideas?

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