Using Twitter at the HIV Prevention Leadership Summit

Blog.AIDS.gov: "Part of NPIN’s mission is to “provide timely information and resources to prevention partners through innovative approaches to knowledge/information transfer”. To help further that mission, NPIN will be using Twitter at the HIV Prevention Leadership Summit next week in Washington, DC. We’ll be using Twitter to support and encourage attendees’ conversations and provide virtual attendees with up-to-the-minute updates on the conference, plenaries, and workshops."

Comments: This conference ends tomorrows, December 15. But anyone can follow it DURING OR AFTER the conference at http://twitter.com/search?q=2010HPLS (you do NOT need a Twitter account).

However, most of the "tweets" from this conference that we've seen so far are not very useful to the general public outside the meeting. In our experience, Twitter works well for certain specific purposes -- for example, informing people about some resource -- often on a Web page, or at a certain event or location in the conference (for people who are there). Announcements often work; for example, the most famous tweet of all time consisted of a single word, "arrested" (sent by a U.S. journalist in Egypt). But except for certain kinds of uses, where Twitter can work extremely well, it's hard to say much in 140 characters.