A New Twitter Account For WWW 2010
Posted by Brian Kelly on 26 Apr 2010
This week I’m in Raleigh, North Carolina for the WWW 2010 conference. This involves a week of events, including tutorials on Monday, workshops on Tuesday and the FutureWeb conference (which runs in parallel with the more research-focussed WWW 2010 conference) on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
I visited the conference venue on Sunday and tested the WiFi network – everything was fine, but whether that will be the case when the conference starts remains to be seen.
My preparation for the conference has been to set up a new Twitter account, @briank_live, which I intend to use for live conference blogging.
I now use a number of Twitter accounts: @briankelly is my main one (which I use for both work and social purposes), @ukwebfocus (which provides automated updates of new blog posts and other RSS feeds and now @briank_live.
I wonder if we are seeing greater use of multiple Twitter accounts or is this still a minority use case? I also wonder what names people who have multiple accounts are using to relate their multiple Twitter ‘personalities’? I used the _live suffix based on Mike Nolan’s @mikenolanlive approach, which he describes in his Twitter bio: “I’m usually @MikeNolan – Web Manager at Edge Hill University. This account is for live tweeting events“. What approaches are you taking? And do you think multiple Twitter accounts for different uses is helpful, or does it fragment the content?
UK Web Focus (Brian Kelly) 
Mike Nolan said
I should mention that I got the idea from Martin Belam (aka @currybet / @currybet_live).
I’ve found it can be quite a useful way of making quick notes about an event out of context of your normal Twitter stream so you don’t have give detail about an event.
In the past when I’ve used the live account I’ve cross promoted with my normal account, for example at the end of the day announcing:
And announce from my main account a couple of times during the day interesting things that someone could see on the live stream.
Ian Cooper said
I suspect cases like this would be less necessary if it were easier to configure twitter clients to show timelines excluding particular hashtags. For example, during the #debill debate I had several contacts tweeting away at >2 tweets/minute, which completely filled my timeline. It made me seriously consider unfollowing them as it was completely impossible to see what else was going on.
In the meantime these secondary accounts are a good way to not lose followers, I suspect ;-) (but please take Mike’s advice and cross-tweet (retweet) the really interesting stuff)
Jeremy Speller said
I nicked the idea from Mike and have been using @spellerlive for about a year now. At a conference people follow the hashtag, not the people. This means that as long as you hashtag your secondary account properly no one should have to follow you (unless they want to via the cross-referral mentioned by Mike above). The problem with too many secondaries is that a unique email address is required to associate with each Twitter account and you soon run out of email addresses!! Unless someone knows different…
The Man Who Didn’t Tweet Twice « Little Storping-in-the-Swuff said
[…] I’m going to use a “live” account (this is something I’ve seen @MikeNolan do very effectively as @MikeNolanLive) for conferences and the like. However I’m finding it hard to see the […]
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