In advance of the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, DC next week, we need to talk about Twitter. Twitter is a great platform for sharing and navigating the craziness that will be this huge meeting. As far as I can tell, many astro outreach folks are on twitter, but not many scientists (except those with blogs). For the purposes of this meeting, this should change. It would be awesome if people tweeted about the science going on at the meeting to help people find/not miss what they are most interested in, but also to help people find out about exciting things going on outside their own subfield.
Examples of useful tweets would be: a talk your looking forward to, along with a time and room; big results you just found out about; and posters that should not be missed, along with landmarks (e.g., back right corner, across from the Spitzer booth). Other useful things for talk hoppers would be letting people know about schedule changes and how many minutes behind a session is.
The way this works is to just include the hash tag ‘#aas215’ in all your AAS tweets and anybody, even folks without twitter accounts, can see them: http://twitter.com/search?q=#aas215.
While a lot of us will have our laptops, the beauty of Twitter is that it’s super easy to use on mobile devices. So, I’m given AAS attendees an assignment: sign up for a twitter account (optional), set up a twitter app on your mobile device (I use Tweetie on my iPhone), and learn how to save a search term (#aas215).
Looking forward to reading your tweets!
http://twitter.com/kellecruz
OK, I’m a big Twitter skeptic, so convince me this is useful. In my experience the most precious resource at one of these meetings is time and attention: one cannot possibly see anywhere close to everything that there is to see (not even 1/10th, really) and the last thing I want is to be bombarded with a bunch of one-sentence distractions pointing me in fifteen different directions.
The things I want to get out of the AAS meeting are going to be pretty distinct from the things an observational X-ray astronomer or a CMB theoretician would want to see. A giant disorganized pile of real-time tweets with no filtering strikes me as 90% useless. Furthermore, when I’m at a session, I would much rather try to concentrate on paying attention to the talk I’m actually hearing, rather than worrying about tweeting how many minutes behind schedule the session is, or whatever.
I suspect the reason that most scientists (as opposed to outreach people, etc) are not on twitter is that this kind of distracted, bite-sized thought process is pretty much the antithesis of the sustained concentration that it takes to work on research. That’s how I feel, anyway.
</curmudgeon>
as a “scientist” on twitter I will be curious as to what the #aas215 twitter stream will contain given such a large setting. Regardless, “bombarded with [] distractions pointing me in 15 different directions,” is a pretty good portrayal of my typical AAS experience, anyway. a twitter stream almost certainly must subset the overall experience.
the piece of the my AAS experience not reflected in Marshall’s phrase is the massive disconnect I feel when embedded in a large, mostly unfamiliar population. if the twitter stream promotes new interactions via shared thoughts/questions then the value of the stream (for me) is further proven.
@augustmuench
A couple responses to Marshall’s concerns:
– Don’t knock it until you try it. You describe twitter as how you *imagine* it to be, not how it actually is.
– For me, twitter has provided a super easy/fast/efficient way to be informed of things that I would otherwise have no way of finding out about. I *do* care about the big results in other subfields. The way I learned about and parsed the maybe dark matter detection was through Twitter. In my life, it’s not a “giant disorganized pile,” it’s a concise listing of the take-home messages on topics that I care about but that I have chosen to not dedicate “sustained concentration” to.
– I don’t know about you, but I’m usually in a session for only 1 or 2 talks and find myself twiddling my thumbs for a fair amount of time. I agree, AAS is hectic, but I think for many people there is a non-negligible amount of short bursts of dead time where twitter on your mobile device could fit right in.
btw, here are my tweets from the Pasadena June AAS meeting:
As I’ve noted on my Facebook status the iPhone autocomplete changes AAS to an option describing one’s bum, so I can’t promise mine will always be tagged correctly 😉 (am erinleeryan on twitter and am still working on being a proper tweeter but I use TweetDeck because it was free and as a grad student I’m the definition of cheap).
To those skeptical of the power of twitter, I think the DARPA network challenge early in the month was a good example of things you can learn from social networking. I have to say that the description of the challenge (that DARPA was going to deploy 10 red weather balloons in cities) and that you had to submit the positions of them in an effort to win $40k was poorly publicised was an understatement. None the less, by a random blog reading I was aware of the challenge and realized what the red balloon was doing in Charlottesville of all places the day of deployment. After posting on twitter the status “spied a red balloon from #darpanetworkchallenge” I was queried by no less than 6 teams in an hour wanting the location. I don’t doubt that MIT won the money thanks to the power of twitter and Facebook and some good query algorithms.