A Party Theory of Twitter in 20 Slides

Here’s my presentation from the Glug event last week. It’s not the smartest presentation in the world. But it had to work in 5 minutes, at night, in front of a couple of hundred drunk designers in a pub. So that might explain the slant I gave it…

I added some extra notes and hopefully it still makes a bit of sense without the presenter.

Sorry Nathan I had to do it. At the time I did explain that I love you and your blog ;-)

The actual thing had lots of video clips and whizzy bits, but I still can’t figure out a good quick way of getting ‘richer’ presentations online without spending a lot of time editing video. If anyone’s got any smart tips I’d love to hear them.

22 thoughts on “A Party Theory of Twitter in 20 Slides”

  1. After a long while (pretty much all of 2007 and 2008) of thinking Twitter lent only to tedious egotistical drivel whereby people announce trivia (or otherwise) of their lives without paying attention to the environment they find themselves in, I logged in one day to find enough of my friends on the thing that I finally got into the groove of using it as a low-importance, high-latency group IM tool. Which is a good thing. So I have an extra point to add, which is an extension of your “I just said something cool”: Don’t just post up shit about yourself without ever reading or replying to what other people post. Would you walk into a room and say “Hey I just ate fish for dinner!” and not even care what other people had for dinner? (Not in my party, anyway.) It makes you look like a tedious, egotistical bore.

  2. Gore makes a brilliant point. So many people seem to have fallen in the groove of writing things about them and not actually engaging with anyone else. There is a danger that Twitter will just tunr in to a shouting party. How big can CAPS go?
    That said, your slideshow was a thing of enjoyment. About a topic that is typically difficult to explain, made easy. You did it. You go girl! @planbstudio

  3. It’s sad that you had to state the bloody obvious, but you do it well :) I’ve been getting disheartened that people who I consider to be very smart don’t behave how I’d expect (want?) them to on Twitter. Tweeting every blog post you write is a little like the boy who cried wolf to the point where I have stopped clicking which I’m sure has caused me to miss some really great posts. Retweeting a tweet where someone has bigged you up simply makes you look like an arse and sadly more people are starting to do it. Can people go back to saying what they’re doing more often? It seemed much more fun in those days or maybe it was simply because we could say what we really mean without the wrong people hearing? ;-)

  4. I read recently about this chap in the 60s who implanted an electrode into a homosexual man’s brain in order to stimulate some part of the brain that controls pleasure. He then showed him heterosexual p0rn and the like to convince him to turn straight. He even made him sleep with a prostitute. Anyway, there was a point during the experiment that he allowed the man access to this button that would stimulate this area of his brain whenever he wanted. The man ended up pressing the button over 3000 times within an hour or so. Sometimes I feel like that man, there are simply too many interesting fun people on twitter and I don’t really understand why some people haven’t really latched on to it yet.

  5. You missed out the worst twitter sin of all. It is so awful it make me want to hurt myself: When people retweet someone else’s tweet about them!! Like this:

    RT @iaintait @andywhitlock just wrote a great post! http://bit.ly/5762

    I saw *someone* do this four times in five minutes! Each one linking to the SAME post of theirs, that they had ALREADY tweeted themselves.

    Aaaaarghhghhghh!! Thinking about it again has just made me really angry.

  6. p.s. Sorry – I made up that bit.ly url and it turns out it’s a real one. I’m not selling mp3s. Please RT ;)

  7. That is a good presentation, really pretty too. I accept that twitter has good uses, and rocks for some people.

    But really, is “another low-importance high-latency group IM tool” a good thing? Really? C’mon. The clue surely has to be in the words ‘low-importance’, ‘high-latency’ and ‘tool’.

  8. @ Anthony Goh – yes, it is a good thing. It’s different, it encourages a different kind of communication, and that is a good thing.

  9. Top presentation. That Tait sense of humour in full e-f-f-e-c-t!

    OK if I retweet this? Yeahhhhhhhhhhh sod it!

  10. @iaintait we both joined Twitter on the same day, 981 days ago, and it’s the longest party i’ve ever stuck around at, and the only one of MINE you’ve been too ;-)

  11. It's sad that you had to state the bloody obvious, but you do it well :) I've been getting disheartened that people who I consider to be very smart don't behave how I'd expect (want?) them to on Twitter. Tweeting every blog post you write is a little like the boy who cried wolf to the point where I have stopped clicking which I'm sure has caused me to miss some really great posts. Retweeting a tweet where someone has bigged you up simply makes you look like an arse and sadly more people are starting to do it. Can people go back to saying what they're doing more often? It seemed much more fun in those days or maybe it was simply because we could say what we really mean without the wrong people hearing? ;-)

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