Zeno 4803
Apr 01, 2009 By Tim Aidlin
As the keynote started, there were five of us spread out around a table in a conference room on the fourth floor of the Venetian Hotel Conference center. I had Tweetdeck up, and was watching what the attendees were thinking. Jim Lin of Vertigo sat across from me, busy working on a fix to the Twitter feed on the homepage of http://live.visitmix.com (it’s since been retired from the homepage, but here’s a screenshot of what it looked like during the conference.)
We had also been using Twitter earlier in the show to help power Flotzam on the big screens directly before the keynote addresses on days one and two.
I worked on this project with Karsten Januszewski, who also wrote a good Opinion post recently revolving around his experience with Twitter.
The immediacy of feedback with technologies such as Twitter are amazing. By searching for keywords, or “hashtags” (ie., #mix09, #mixonline) and coupled with software such as Tweetdeck, which aggregates searches, I was able to get a view exactly of what the audience, both at the event and online, is thinking.
This is both good and bad: 1) it’s good because you can immediately react to problems and address users concerns. And 2) see number one. Not only could *I* see where people were having difficulties with the site, but *everyone* could see where people were having trouble with the site, which meant that Jim and I had to, well, fix the site *now.*
Now, the reality is that nothing was broken and everything went basically according to plan. Yes, getting the on-demand session videos online took the vendor a little longer than we had anticipated. Yes vendors did have to make some last-minute adjustments to the Session Browser and Twitter client on the homepage. In all, though, the total experience rocked: we had live streaming video on the homepage, a live, *unedited* Twitter feed that anyone could access by hashtagging their Tweet with #mix09. We wanted to be open at the risk of being taken advantage of. My faith in humanity still stands. Everyone was respectful. Thanks ;-)
The feedback through the MIX09 event was invaluable. We continue to welcome your suggestions and thoughts on how to make the experience as fluid and friendly as possible. Make sure to follow MIX Online on Twitter at @MIXOnline, the MIX09 conference at @mix09 and me, personally, at @Systim
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::: systim out :::
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2 Comments so far. You should leave one, too.
I was in the audience for MIX rather than watching remotely and I know it’s probably a completely different team and system, but… I watched the keynote from WWPC the other month, live, and the video stream was continually breaking and restarting. We figured in the end that it was the stream of facebook and twitter comments down the side of the video; everytime that updated, the video broke. Could I encourage anyone doing this mix of content and commentary to let me as a consumer choose if I want to concentrate on the content and not have it degraded by the comment integration; I;d love a clicky box to turn viewing tweets and statuses on and off on a video streaming page.
Hi Mary, it is a different team but I can relay the message for you. For PDC and MIX, we are updating the live player that will make the experience better. Not sure why the WWPC team had issues with their player, but I will make sure our team takes your input and gives you a more controlled experience.