The first time I gave it a whirl was during a professional conference at the CU Law School. A handful of folks in the audience were on Twitter and after a speaker on the very first panel made a point about a telecom crowd that doesn't know Twitter. As you might guess, he wasn't impressed. Nonetheless, we few, we merry few soldiered on at #sfdbm. I had heard about conference participants who Twittered during presentations or to find each other during breaks at large, multi-day events. I have to say, the Twitter stream didn't do much for me. Perhaps, there were not enough people engaged -- probably less than five percent of conference attendees. The main problem was that I was more interested in what the speakers had to say than the 140 character commentaries of the audience.
About ten days later I had the Amgen Tour of California on television in my office while I slogged away at some administrative work. I jumped into the Twitter stream with a couple dozen posts and watched #atoc climb to number three in the Twitter trends. It was exciting to see live posts from the team director of Astana home to Levi Leipheimer and Lance Armstrong's. I watched as the collective reporting of the Twitterati beat the announcers on television with key information such as who had fallen, which rider was joining a break and winners of various climbing or sprint points available on the racecourse. Yet, it basically served as a distraction. Any given post was too short to convey rich information. Perhaps doing three things at once is too much for me. I was content to focus on my accounting while the television murmured from across the room.
Finally, during last week's episode of Lost I fired up the computer and watched in astonishment as scores of Twitter posts came in every couple minutes. #lost was an immediate information overload.
Sadly, my conclusion is that multitasking is fine but multitasking with multiple streams of incoming information is too much for my slow mental processor.
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