Analysis of Twitter for SXSW Lacy Lynchmob behaviour

At the time of the Sarah Lacy / Mark Zuckerberg interview I was working at my desk in London, and started to see the Twitters rolling in, and after a while (and a bit of searching other people's feeds) it felt to me like mob behaviour was breaking out - I blogged on it at the time in fact.

Now a very interesting post by Kee Hinckley analyses the Twitter traffic at the time. Its great to see analysis rather than the pure opinion that is the usual standard fare in these issues - especially if it backs me up

The graphics are also very good.

The predictions at the end of the piece are good too:

This experience, and the past month that I've spent intensively using Twitter, have led me to a few beliefs about where this all is leading us.

The first one easy. Anyone who runs a conference, panel or large meeting without monitoring the backchannel is simply asking for trouble. Ironically, SXSW did have an official chatroom for the keynote, but that did not receive as much traffic, nor was it being monitored as a backchannel should be.

The second one is longer term. For several generations social networking on the computer has been derided as not having the depth or value of real life social interactions. Tools like Twitter (and Facebook), which blur the lines between work and home, important and trivial, and which deliberately create a malleable and ambiguous set of simple tools ("status", "poke", "what are you doing") are the primitive forerunners of what the next generation will take for granted. The always-on aspects will surely migrate to phones and become a constant part of our online life. The interfaces may be crude, but I am already more connected to the lives of people halfway across the world than I am with my next door neighbors.