@Multizone

One of the AV screens showing videos and highlights with a twitter panel on the right with a twical tweet -  (you can't see it here but the tweet was correctly geocoded too)

#wpc10 Microsoft UK etc 'now' at Walter .E. Washington #twical

As alpha tester in chief of twical.net, an open source calendar to tweet service I tried an experiment at wpc10 - Microsoft's worldwide partner conference in Washington D.C. The conference published a session scheduler on the Internet. I was able to set my timetable for the whole event.

Now, some of you may know that twical.net, a project that Multizone sponsored at Warblecamp, and reports on progress at London Twitter Developer Nest can take a calendar feed as an input. So I decided to test it our using my activities at #wpc10.

Method

I sat down and laboriously set my schedule for the conference using the application at the digital wpc website Once completed I was able to download a .ics file. iCal on my Mac wouldnt open it however, so I synced to Outook 2010 and exported it from there on a PC, and iCal was now able to read it. In iCal I quickly modified each event to have the location set to the conference venue and room if available, and the subject to have '#wpc10' then the original subject.

Now I imported them all into the twical hub, and waited to get to Washington. Sure enough twical began to tweet on my behalf, an hour before each event saying it was in an hour, and at the time of the event saying it was happening now. We fixed a few timezone related bugs affecting exactly when these tweets were going out and it became reliable. It was completely fun to me to see my tweets flashing up with absolute precise regularity on all the twitter enabled screens round the conference. It also had a dramatic effect. I put on dozens of new followers from the Microsoft community. Good ones. People in senior roles, partners, other attendees. I participated in meals and panels I would never have reached without twitter - and twical. Twical is an open source web service that can be applied to many purposes where calendar information needs to be tweeted. Stay tuned for more implementations after this great experimental test.