I watched with interest as there seemed to be some meaty subject matter, even if a little of the maverick some of us would have liked to have seen in solution ideas didn’t show so much.

You are right, tweets are great for immediacy but unsatisfying for the heavier topics that were on the agenda. CoverItLive does a good job of bringing blogging and twitter streams together … and housing that in one place with, say, Kate’s pictures and videos would have been much more powerful.

All this aside, it’s great to see conference organisers playing around with the format and trying to broaden the reach.

I think in given the limitations of Twitter the team did a good job at the summit, and I didn’t find my stream being over saturated by posts (although I can understand that if you weren’t trying to follow the summit, it could have felt that way).

I wasn’t following the Twitter stream as closely as I would’ve liked to, so that made it even more difficult to get a real sense of what was going on. I really like your suggestion that if a full stream isn’t available, the Twitter group could have ’split up’ tasks and even made little post-session videos.

I really think, though, that the only way to get people really engaging with what’s going on (to ask meaningful questions, for example) would be a full video stream, and I guess that’s something to be worked on in the longer term.

In any case, it’s great to see forums like Future Summit opening up to new communications media like Twitter and really trying to engage people who aren’t at the summit. It makes the general public more interested, and stops summits from becoming stale – like you said, it adds some edginess, and for something like the Future Summit that can only be a good thing.

- Bill