Twitter conference mixes #work and #play
Sunday’s all-day TWTRCON event in San Francisco drew a couple hundred attendees looking for ways to make money off Twitter’s still-growing popularity. Blogger/photographer/PR guy Brian Solis and journalist-turned-capitalist Gina Smith were among the many bright minds to be found in the hallway.
You can catch up on the event on Twitter, but here’s the gist of what I’m hearing: Right now a lot of people think of Twitter as a cool new place to hang out. Thanks to Twitter’s simple API, just about anything on the Internet can be connected to it. It requires little technical work and almost no network bandwidth.
“I don’t go to the CEO and say, here’s our ROI on Twitter,” one panelist said. That’s because the investment is so small to have an employee monitor Twitter for customer complaints, or to allow Twitter users to login to a site by using their Twitter username and password.
One attendee theorized that Twitter and Facebook are fighting for the same brand position, and only one can win. In three years, Twitter could be as forgotten as Podcasting and Friendster. But for now, if you’ve got a product that can be Twitter-fied in any way, it’s worth implementing solely for the buzz.
[Photo by Brian Solis]
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About the Author, Paul Boutin
Paul (paul@venturebeat.com) covers Apple & the iPhone, social networks & social media, digital music & video, and any crazy Internet story. Paul wrote and edited for Valleywag from 2006-2008, after several years with Wired magazine and Slate. He writes regularly for The New York Times' technology section and sometimes for Wired and The Wall Street Journal. He studied computer science at MIT in the early 1980s, and worked as a software developer and network administrator for 15 years before becoming a professional writer. Follow him on Twitter at @paulboutin, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.