A friend shared a new tool with me the other day called ‘Wiffiti’. Now I’ve posted before about how good Twitter is for conferences. This little gadget gets around the issue that not everyone in your audience at an event will either be on Twitter or have a device on them that enables them to tweet there.

You create a ‘screen’ on wiffiti by choosing key words – if  it’s a conference you would choose the conference ‘hashtag’ (eg. something like #tech10).

All the tweets using that term will appear on the screen in a pretty format and move around like a movie. The additional benefit of this particular tool is that people can text in comments from their mobile phones – thus opening the ‘backchannel’ up to non-twitter users.

Here’s an example one I made using the key words ‘learning’, ‘lluk’, ‘@ll_uk’ and ‘#lrnchat’: http://wiffiti.com/screens/42020

I wanted to embed it here in my blog but I couldn’t get it to work, so apologies.

Here’s a screen capture of what it looks like (the real version is animated with the different messages moving around on the screen, to see that version click on the link above):

A great back drop for your event, something to have on the screen in between speakers and something that might trigger some conversation or even make the speakers adjust what they’re saying!

Quite a nice little tool I think. I think that it’s better for display purposes than as something you would have on your own computer screen at home on your own, if you want something similar that you can also interact with, I recommend Twitterfall.

Update 4th November

I just found a further Twitter tool for conferences on Twitter called Backchatter. Now I haven’t seen it in action but it looks great fun. It basically turns your Twitter feed for the conference into an online game. It reminds me of ‘jargon bingo’ if you’ve ever played that before in a boring meeting! This one seems to have been created for just one conference (#dl10) but it is very innovative. Have a look here: http://bc.impactgames.com/