So Twitter was a big success at SXSW for bringing people together. As was laid out by Jeremiah Owyang, it was used to revolt against the Zuckerberg/Lacey interview, improve panels, and to find/start parties.
But what empowered Twitter to be so helpful? Most of it’s users were in the same geographic area.
I have Twitter friends from all over the country… all over the world. There are times when I want to be able to see what everyone in my “global neighborhood” is doing. That is fine.
There are other times when I want to go grab a beer and I’m curious what everyone else is up to. What my friends in Boulder, Colorado are doing doesn’t help me find beer drinking company here in Washington DC.
It’d be cool if there was a mobile app that would append my geo-location or maybe just my zipcode on to the end of all my and my friends’ Twitter messages.
In addition to saying I always want to get SMS messages from certain twitter users, I could get SMS messages when tweets happen in my same geographic location. Seems like this would be useful.
This make sense?
4 responses so far ↓
karl // March 14, 2008 at 3:11 am
It is useful until it is not anymore. Visibility is easy to gain. Privacy and opacity is a *lot* harder to regain after having been exposed, specifically on the Web.
Henny // March 14, 2008 at 1:48 pm
I think it makes total sense Justin. I saw more than a few Tweets from folks saying that they felt “drowned out” by all the SXSW Tweets. I reckon tagging and categorising is the way to go, that way you can customise your Tweet streams in a way that makes sense for you.
Doug // March 14, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Now we can explain what twitter is via a video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o
Friendly Intelligence - March 16, 2008 // March 16, 2008 at 1:02 pm
[...] Why Twitter Was So Successful at SXSW…Geography - Justin writes about how helpful twitter was at SXSW, but rightly so talks about the importance of geography (while giving a shout out to Boulder). It seems the issue of geography is growing, as people want to tie the online world to the offline. One of the best sessions I attended at SXSW was on mobile gaming, and talked about the ability (and limitations) of using gps to physically locate people and objects in real life. Very cool, heady stuff. [...]
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