I recently spent some vacation time at ALA. I took it as vacation so I could visit friends and family after the conference was done.
Like Walt Crawford before me, I thought Twitter had potential as a communications tool during ALA. He didn’t find it helpful, but I thought it was worth a shot. I had a wireless comm device (An XO laptop), a group of colleagues at conference who were also on Twitter.
So I sent out updates and tried to organize lunches through Twitter. But it didn’t work out. Why?
The first time I tried to set up a lunch via Twitter, I asked people to DM me if they wanted to have lunch. I figured if anyone responded, I could send them my cell number and we could connect. Someone did. But when I went to send my cell number, the convention center wireless went out. Valerie Glenn, I’m very sorry. Technically this wasn’t Twitter’s fault.
Today I simply tweeted that I’d be in a certain place around noon. I went to the appointed place and had the good fortune to find a non-Twitter friend to have lunch with. I asked him to wait while I checked Twitter for other lunch partners. Twitter apologized for being over capacity and showed me a flock of birds.
This wasn’t the first trouble I’d had with Twitter at ALA and I wasn’t the only Twitter enthusiast who had trouble. A friend speculated that ALA might be at fault for Twitter because so many librarians have latched onto it so coming to a conference brought a burst of tweets too much for ol Twitter to bear.
Whatever the reason, Twitter doesn’t seem to scale well and I’ll be leaving It out of my conference toolbox next time. At least until I see some documented conference success stories.
Filed under: communications, librarians, library 2.0, me | Tagged: ala2008
That doesn’t seem to be that good… did anyone suggest to contact Twitter for a follow up?
No one suggested following up to me. Perhaps it was out of a sense of “You get what you pay for.” Thanks for stopping by.