Twitter has ruined ColdFusion conferences (if you can't go)
That title is very provocative, but hear me out.
In the old days (last year), if you couldn't go to a ColdFusion conference like CFUnited or cf.Objective(), you could watch the blogs during the opening keynote and see all of the new news about the upcoming ColdFusion. It was awesome! Well, this year's cf.Objective() was probably the first big ColdFusion conference where most of the bloggers are now using twitter (and not blogging as much). So I decided to watch twitter instead of the blogs. But guess what? Twitter does NOT support "live blogging" very well, especially if it's a technical conference. Why? 140 characters. You cannot type lots of demo code, or bullet points, or anything like that when you are limited by twitter's posting rules.
Now, there may be ways around this, but if there are none of the cf.Objective twitterers were using them. I learned very little of use from watching #cfobjective that morning. Just today, I finally found that Andy Matthews live blogged the event (I couldn't find this the day of cf.Objective, for some reason). Thanks Andy, that's awesome!
If you can't make it to CFUnited, don't worry. At least I'll be doing a real live blog from the keynote. :)
Jake Munson
36 Yrs old
Twitter is killing blogs, people tweet more and blog less, I am guilty of this myself.
The reason, why is because it's easier and faster.
The platform is easy, but you can't share code in 140 characters, so it will never replace blogs, well not in my opinion.
I think that Twitter has its place where it is more for conversation, and blogs(well at least tech stuff like CF & flash) are more for sharing examples, code,and yes ideas, but the two have different purposes in my view.
The 140-character limit on Twitter comes from the desire to keep the messages short enough so they could be delivered as text messages on a cell phone...I wonder if anyone on the go settled for "watching" the cfObjective() keynote on their phone.
The best solution would be to use a microblogging system like Twitter that doesn't have a 140-character limit. Perhaps some of the Twitter competitors like Laconica or FriendFeed let you post longer messages.
But the problem with the 140 character limit (for SMS) is...do we really need SMS anymore? Don't most smart phones support other communication methods that aren't as arcane as SMS? I agree with Rich. Twitter is goofy and I sincerely hope we get over this fad soon and move on to more useful messaging.
By the way, it's possible to do much of the mobile twitter goodness using normal blogs (or other tools), so I just don't get it.
Yes, it's possible to do updates via blogging, but it's not easy. I wouldn't want to try and live blog a keynote with BlogCFC: typing, saving, clicking the post link to go back, scrolling down to the end of my last update, and typing again. Doing it with Google Docs would be easier, but you still have to tell people where they can find that particular Google Document...probably with a Twitter post. :)
I'm not trying to say Twitter is the best solution to live blogging: it's not. But I think the best solution is a technology that makes instant updates as easy as possible for the blogger, allows the blogger to say as much as they want per posting, and pushes that updated content to subscribers/listeners at near-instant speeds without them needing to hit reload.
I attended cf.Objective() and I tweeted the highlights of sessions I was in. I don't find code snippets interesting because what's important at cf.Objective() is concepts and observations.
Twitter was great for attendees because they could track where their friends were in other sessions and get a sense of which sessions were working better than others.
With TweetDeck I had a live search for cfobjective and could watch several people tweeting in each session - which gave me plenty of context.
As others have noted, most of the software we use for blogging is very poor for "live blogging" and I can see why some people resort to Google Docs. I don't find most people's GDocs have sufficient information in them to warrant the hassle.
@Sean,
I am not dissing twitter in general, just saying that the cf.Objective twittering was mediocre at best, from a sitting at home perspective. Personally I don't use twitter, but this is because I don't really have time for it after I read all my blogs, catch up on the news, and all the other things I do to stay abreast of current events. I will say that I'd be more inclined to microblog if twitter weren't the king of the hill. In my opinion, twitter is to microblogging what AOL was to the Internet in the 90's. I'm hoping laconica or something similar will take the market share in the long run.