Twestival

warzabidul - Feb 4, 2009

What makes the first meetups so great is that you spend weeks and months talking to people, you develop a relationship with those people so that when you finally meet them you’re really happy. That feeling is made even nicer when you realise you have similar interests to people you had not met yet.

Now the tweetups and other meetings often feel like a formality, nothing fun, nothing innovative. That is not to say that I don’t like tuttle. In fact I do like tuttle because there you still have that young entrepreunerial spirit, those innovators and thinkers. There’s a lot to be gained from the tuttle meetups. That’s a concept that works really well in my eyes.

There is a video of me at the only Twestival event I have ever been to and I lay into the event for the fashionistas that attended the event. I was so disappointed with the event as a whole that I have lost my passion for going to social media events, especially when I need to travel over a thousand kilometers. Environmental conscience is one good reason for not travelling to these events but the second is the quality of the people there. When I talked to people at the Twestival event and asked them about twitter they looked at me strangely, when I asked them about how many tweets they had written they told me from five to two hundred on average. As a passionate twitter user and having been to a lot of social media events, tweetups and seesmeetups this really dissapointed me. The event felt like nothing more than a facade, nothing more than an opportunity for people to say “look at how trendy I am, I’m on twitter” yet not understanding anything about the ethos of the twitter way of life. I love twitter, and I love those that use it well, I love how certain people use it the same way they use sms and other social means. I don’t like that in Switzerland I’m strange because I use twitter. I like it even less that over here twitter will never be popular. There is no reason for it because of social cohesion, but also a far smaller community. Switzerland is about skiing, sailing, cycling, hiking, parapente and more sports. We’re not in a city. We’re in the countryside, Europe’s playground. Why be geeky when sports would be more social. More to the point everything is current. I don’t need to wait two to five years for people to adopt the sports. That’s why I’m coming back to Twitter on Valentine’s day. (It’s also the day I got my driving licence ;-))

richard - Sep 5, 2008

i always wake up early after a good night out. Enjoying the fresh air today :-). What time did you end up leaving last night?

It was lovely last night, I’m surprised your up and logging so early today though…you had quite a bit to drink ;-) Maybe Trafalgar Square has that effect on you!

The first tweetup I went to saw a crowd of no more than sixty people. The twestival had many more. Enough to fill the Doon club. So many new faces but not many new people to follow. It’s fun to see how big the London twitter community has become. The usual people were there, sizemore, loudmouthman, documentally, danacea weaverluke and a few new faces like digitalmaverick, amandita, Poppyd and a few more people. Some video was shot of the event but I’m not sure by when they’ll go up. There was no wifi so no opportunity to do some live streaming. At the same time I’m thinking it’s time for a plurk up of the same scale, since for the moment there are so few people. Now it’s time for Tuttle.