Twitter + OpenWorld and More

It seems like Twitter will be part of OpenWorld, if Eddie and I have anything to do with it. Floyd says he’s making his first foray into Twiterville at OpenWorld. He’s soliciting questions OAUG Fusion Council Panel on Sunday afternoon. So, tweet away with your questions.

Tim, on the other hand, doesn’t get Twitter and won’t be participating. I understand and was slow to adopt as well. Tim, the value of Twitter isn’t what you say, so much as what your network says. I think the main value uncovered recently lies in the ability to attend events virtually, e.g. Scoble’s tweeting of the OpenSocial press conference. Twittering OpenWorld allows people not in San Francisco to get some of the experience vicariously, and it also allows attendees to spread themselves across overlapping sessions.

Anyway, if you’re new to OpenWorld, here’s a guide for noobs. Similarly, if you’re new to Twitter, here’s a noob guide.

Picking up yesterday’s discussion about using Twitter at OpenWorld, I think we have two methods, each with pros and cons. So, if you’re interested, choose one and go with that.

Tweet @oow
So, Eddie set up the oow dummy account. To get started, follow oow. Then, if you’re attending OpenWorld, tweet @oow with your updates. If you’re not attending, tweet @oow with questions you want answered. You can watch the collected stream by following oow or subscribe to its RSS feed.

Pros: This is a relatively easy way to collect tweets into a single stream, which is both easy to update and easy to follow.

Cons: Because of Twitter’s 140-character limit, four characters of your messages are burned when you tweet @oow (which is four characters). This isn’t a huge limitation, but it’s a limitation.

Eventtrack
Craig took a similar approach with eventtrack, but his implementation collects all your tweets after you turn on tracking, no need to waste four characters on @oow. Simply follow eventtrack on Twitter, then tweet @eventtrack start*oow to start tracking all your tweets. Replace oow with your event or conference of choice. When you want to stop tweeting for that conference, tweet @eventtrack stop*oow.

Another value add is the UI Craig built for viewing the tweets. Use the UI to search for your event to see all its tweets in a single place, which (of course) has an RSS feed. Watch his video for details.

Pros: It’s simple, and the UI filters out all the noise you might have on Twitter, targeting just event-related tweets. The implementations saves you the @event characters too. This may be minimal for oow, but not so minimal for something like barcampbangalore. After all, Twitter enforces brevity, so you’re not really in a position to give away characters.Cons: Once you turn on eventtrack, everything you tweet is recorded in the event stream. So, you’ll either want to turn it on/off frequently or keep your unrelated tweets to a minimum to avoid polluting the stream.For OpenWorld
So what? If you want to tweet and follow tweets from OpenWorld, you have a couple options.

1. Tweet @oow. Eddie has set oow to follow eventtrack, so you can view tweets from oow in Craig’s UI or in Twitter. Subscribe to oow’s RSS feed in Twitter or in eventtrack.
2. Turn on eventtrack and tweet away. Your tweets will also show up in the oow stream. Subscribe to oow’s RSS feed in eventtrack.

Pretty cool stuff overall. Dennis blogged about our little ad hoc collabortion, not once, but twice today, which is pretty significant since he’s been pretty hard on Oracle over the years.

Other Updates
Dennis also mentions the launch of the Oracle Wiki, which Justin also covers here. I have posted the list of sessions at OpenWorld of interest to bloggers here. If you have additions, please add them. The purpose of this list is to point bloggers to existing sessions that would be interesting for them.

In addition, PR is finalizing a bunch of sessions for bloggers only. I’d love to dish on this, but alas, it’s not public just yet. So, these two tracks of activities should keep bloggers nice and busy all week.

Incidentally, I will be speaking to a strategy council on Sunday morning, after which I’ll be wandering around OpenWorld, if anyone wants to find me. I’ll be on Twitter.