I know it's funny, but in fact it's me, by far the oldest guy at KCP, who is actually the greatest fan of Twitter. Perhaps if you don't have as much time left to waste as some of my younger colleagues you learn to appreciate abbreviation.
Anyway, the European Identity Conference which ended yesterday here in Munich produced a bumper crop of Tweets which I have been browsing through this morning at my leisure (first time in a week I'v had any), and I thought I would share a few with those of you who do not yet fully appreciate just how powerful this new medium actually is.
Summing up of a large multinational conference like EIC running over many days and featuring some of the finest speakers in the industry, and doing this in a format that restricts the writer to 140 characters max, is a challenge, of course, but many of those present not only rose to it, but proved themselves past masters of terse, to-the-point, no nosense (well actually, sometimes a bit of nonsense) communication.
Kudos to Bavo de Ridder of Acerta, a Belgian IdM specialist, who ran away with the title "Most Prolific Twitterer" at EIC. Not only did he produce approximately twice as many Tweets as even I, no mean Twitterer myself, managed to thumb into my Palm Treo. We actually at times managed to engage in a twittered dialog, for instance when I posted "Fulup Ar Foll (Sun): 'Roles will not fly in the Cloud'", to which his immediate response was: "@TCole1066 those cases where roles do fly (elegantly) are mostly those cases where roles have a simple attribute relation"
Sometimes our online conversations took a twirky turn, like when Martin Kuppinger gave his keynote and Bavo twittered. "Attending "Beyond the hype - a strategical approach to cloud computing" (I see hype in that title)", leading me to ponder on the "Philosophical question: Is hyping hype a double positive or a double negative?".
The runner up, by the way, was Heide Groshelle of Groshelle Communications, a San Francisco based PR consultancy who helped KCP get thge message about EIC out to the masses and who turns out to be at least equally at home in both the old media and the new.
Tweets turned up from many of the "big guns" in our industry such as Sun's Eve Maler ("@xmlgirl"), Novel's Dale Olds ("@daleolds") and Quest's Jackson Shaw ("@jacksonshaw"). And some like @vibronet, another non-stop Twitterer, chose to remain anonymous, which anyone is perfectly entitled to do on Twitter (one of the rapidly dwindling number of places on the Internet where you still are allowed to wear a mask in public).
Anyway, for what it's worth, I give you here, dear reader, my personal list of favorites culled from 32 pages of conference postings as my very own
Top Ten Tweets From EIC 09
1. "not sure who of you is currently at #eic in munich, but it's the #1 identity conference in europe and def worth checking out."2. " Fulup "user centric for me is a joke" ... thank god Dick Hardt is not at this conference ... would have been a good fight though”
3. "Falling cows are a huge risk since the outcome is fatal, but the probability is low. GRC is about weighing the two. Thanks Dave Kearns!"
4. "If personal information dealers would care about your consent they'd ask - they've got my email..."
5. "Can IdM create risk? Yes, says Niels v.d. Hude of Beta Sys. It's a single point of failure and itself should be monitored and audited"
6. "Kim Cameron states Microsoft will make Active Directory the "motor" for accepting and emitting claims via the Geneva STS server...cool!"
7. "OMG, I've been working on enterprise spaghetti for the last twenty years!"
8. “Google mentioned in the keynote ... where is google in this conference ???”
9. “As long as compliance is treated as a burden, there is a systemic risk that will periodically result in (catastrophic) failures”
10. “Thanks all for a great #eic C u all next year!”