An interesting night was had on Twitter last night.
@canongatebooks and @davesimps0n organised a “world’s first” Twitter based interview with former band members of The Fall to promote Dave’s book The Fallen. It started slowly but got into something of a swing. The idea was to use the hashtag #TheFallen to control the ebb and flow of questions. Great idea and should have been fairly simple. Unfortunately, it was somewhat let down by Twitter (and probably more specifically Twitter Search) as many of the tagged Tweets seemed not to appear (although I did see all of mine in the search).
I did discover, however, that you should take Hex Enduction Hour to a desert island as the vinyl was very thick and would therefore make a good paddle.
It’s a shame when something new like this is let down by some pretty basic failings. I hope people aren’t put off from trying this kind of thing again. Praise goes to Dave and Canongate Books for having go.
One other aspect that this attempt showed was that it is difficult for people to maintain focus on including the hashtag with the ebb and flow of replies and retweets. I suspect there is a feature in there somewhere for a Twitter client to allow the user to ‘lock’ themselves into a conversation and automatically add the necessary hashtag. This would help keep all the conversation visible. At the very least, when replying to a tweet that contains a hashtag automatically adding the tag in the reply would help a lot.
Interestingly, during the interview another mini-Twitter event broke out with @csteinle tweeting live from a siege incident in Edinburgh using hashtag #DalrySiege.
So, there I was, watching an interview with The Fall and a live siege from a couple of miles away. All on the same platform. Shows how diverse a vehicle Twitter can be. But evidence suggests it still needs to work a little better.
