Twitter–what’s it good for? Conferences!

When Twitter first came out, I must admit, I was quite skeptical of the technology.  At the time, it seemed like a poor replacement for Facebook statuses–why replicate a technology for communicating with the people you care about?

I’ve since seen the light by getting into following and posting to conferences that I’m either attending, or monitoring from afar. Doing this allows one to:

• See what’s going on (including snippets of talks by great speakers)
• Connect with people you might not otherwise talk to

I find these connections most interesting.  First, it seems as though there needs to be some “event” that drives people to seek others out (the jury is out on whether it must be face-to-face). Second, by using a #hashtag, people sharing an experience have a means to immediately converse and share ideas with–not just other people sharing the event, but anyone who might be following them. It really constructs a social network–on the fly.

It’s possible that I dig this because I’m a bit of a geek who isn’t one to strike up a conversation, or because of the network effects with more people on Twitter.  Still, I think there’s an interesting