Maybe it’s the Buzz of TED (see favorite quotes here, gathered from afar and mostly through Twitter), but as I turn my attention to the specific new technologies that are transforming events before our eyes, Twitter seems to me to be first and foremost.
As Evan Williams, Twitter’s Co-founder and CEO said in Friday’s talk: "We had no idea Twitter would be so big to cover events".
He made this comment while fans were live tweeting much of his talk. He was sharing his own "Wow, it's bright up here, and lots of people are staring at me. (Giving my talk at #TED.)" Then Host Chris Anderson basically punk’d him, offering up for all to see on screen "Evan Williams is just DYING on stage here at #TED. Worst talk ever” via the live posted feed...
While some may have been put off by the self-referential nature of the Twitter session at TED, it's driven not by Evan (he was wonderfully low key as always, as I think can be seen in Loic Le Meur’s live blog of much of the session). Rather the hero worship is driven by those getting huge value out of the service, perhaps best encapsulated in the tweet of SdGeek "Evan Williams, Twitter CEO on stage? This guy is essentially the same as a heroin dealer to me and my friends."
Wherever you may be personally in your exploration, testing or love for twitter, one useful yardstick for measuring your progress can be found in Rohit Bhargava’s excellent Five Stages of Twitter Acceptance:
See part 2 of this post, for some more specific thinking on what all this means for the events business.
Comments