Whenever I get taking with other social internet wankers about the sort of things we talk about Twitter is always mentioned as some kind of cure-all solution for whatever we’re discussing. Microblogging, it seems, is the big thing. And while I’m fully there, drinking the Twitter kool-aid, I do get a little concerned that our crazy ideas might not play out in the real world quite as well as we hope.
But this is not necessarily a problem. What we’re doing is theorising and the point of theorising is that when you come to a real world problem you’ve probably figured out the solution already. You just haven’t had a chance to apply it yet. And so it came to pass that I just this moment figured out a perfect application for Twitter in the real world.
The music festival.
It came about in a questionnaire from Jenny and Lisa of Capsule asking for advice on how to make this year’s Supersonic festival better. Other than the usual stuff I had an idea. Wouldn’t it be cool if, while you’re watching one band that you’re enjoying you could be informed when the band you really desperately want to see is starting to perform? That way you won’t miss any of the latter but rather than hang around waiting for them to set up you could enjoy something else. Initially I thought of screens by each stage. A little distracting perhaps but it could be made discrete. Then I started to wonder, how would they be updated? Would you have to have one person running a blog from their mobile throughout the whole weekend? That’d be a thankless task. And then it struck me. Mobile phones.
Give each of the stages a Twitter account. These are tied to a phone which is held by whoever is responsible for the running of that stage. It could be the sound guy, the stage manager, however it works. When the band is setting up they send a text to Twitter saying the band will be playing is, say, 10 minutes. When they’re starting they send out another message. Alongside this have a general festival account which puts out general notices. Punters then “follow” the festival accounts and set them to text their phones with updates, resulting in a gentle stream of notices. These can also be fed into displays around the place, maybe hacked into sculptures by artists and the like.
Does that make sense? Okay, try this.
Two stages – A and B
Two bands – X and Y
I really want to see X play. They’re the main reason I came to the festival. They’re due to play stage A at 8pm but are running late. I notice Y are playing stage B so I go check them out.
While I’m enjoying Y, stage A sends a message to Twitter saying X are 10 minutes from starting their set. I get this message on my phone start making my way to A but bump into a friend and lose track of time. As X start their set the stage manager sends another message to Twitter. My phone goes bing and I come to my senses.
Unfortunately X’s set is pretty shite. I give them 20 minutes but it’s not coming together. I have a quick glance at my phone and see that Z started playing on stage C a couple of minutes ago. I’d written off seeing Z since they clashed with X but now the notion is somewhat appealing. And I can pretty much catch the whole set.
And so on.
The drawback is that Twitter only lets you tie one phone to each account, so maybe another service might be better, but in essence this could work really well. It’d certainly get rid of that annoying situation where you dash out of one set you’re enjoying only to discover the other band hasn’t set up yet.
And then, of course, anyone who’s following the festival accounts can in turn be followed and their messages aggregated and displayed somewhere giving a live community blog of the event. “Julian Cope spotted by the pool”, “Fantastic carrot cake by the theatre”, “Beestung Lips are amazing!” and so on.
This has probably been done before. There are no new ideas after all.
Does it cost credit to receive Twitter messages?
This is all probably more practical than my suggestion to improve Supersonic (i.e. an onsite petting zoo).
No. You send them to a normal phone number and there’s no charge to receive. Interesting that your first thought regarding a service based around mobile phones is that it’ll be expensive. ;)
My first thought with practically everything is “Oh and how much is that going to cost me, eh?”
I spent last Truck plugged into the Twitterphone — a bunch of other mates were also on it, we used it most enjoyably. Not how you describe it.
Alex did 140-char reviews of every band he saw. Glenys was mostly doing locations, telling us where things and people were. I twittered awesome stage moments, interesting food opportunities and odd happenings. JP was more planny, proposing stuff. Tom was more experiential and also did warnings.
The effect was (rather than the come-here, go-there scenario you envisage) of having your experience broadened. I got more of the festival that way, and “saw” more out of the festival as a result.
What’d be nice I think would be a way to pick up strangers on twitter in a zone, location or channel. There’s a basic open/closed mechanism already so people who want to stay private can do so, but the “zone, location or channel” aspect isn’t really built into the Twitter system, unfortunately.
I like your idea of the public sculpture — there’s something a bit like that at the mobile phone festivals but it’s depressingly primitive, and of course the messages don’t go anywhere.
“What’d be nice I think would be a way to pick up strangers on twitter in a zone, location or channel. There’s a basic open/closed mechanism already so people who want to stay private can do so, but the “zone, location or channel” aspect isn’t really built into the Twitter system, unfortunately.”
I’m not sure I fully understand that, but it has led me to think of something else worth asking – can you filter what you’re receiving?
A ‘ten minute warning’ message followed by an ‘actually starting’ message for eeeevery single band at the festival would result in a lot of crap to have to delete. Is there any sort of, oh I don’t know, tagging (or similar) that can be applied to Twitter?
I quite like the concept of 140 character reviews of bands – it’s a lot like Fifty Word Fiction (eg http://tangents.co.uk/50words/)
It’s an awesome idea. The announcement thing alone would be great, but the potential for a sort of ‘twitter consciousness’ would be great.
Explaining the notifications and getting people to sign up needs to be done before people arrive.
You can twitter messages like “only 5 sleeps until Capsule” to show how twitter works before they arrive. You need to be careful not to spam peoples phones.
I don’t know what 250 phones all receiving three twitter messages in a row would sound like, I’m guessing not great.
Also you need to be clear on the freeness of it, I think a lot of people are warly of phone scams and rip off texts.
The community aspect is very interesting, all you can do is encourage by example. Have a giant screen showing mini-reviews and explain how to submit your own.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2214/2040864838_3df2dfae9e_o.jpg
You could even get some Flickr photos flying around from the supersonic group?
Russ: “A ‘ten minute warning’ message followed by an ‘actually starting’ message for eeeevery single band at the festival would result in a lot of crap to have to delete.”
Yeah, with my old phone (capacity 200 texts) this would be a complete turn off. With my new phone this is not a problem at all.
That said, one advantage of this is it doesn’t just have to be done over phones. The information can be sent to any internet-enabled device such as”departure board” screens in the bars and so on.
Also, you can turn off the notifications. so say you’re chatting in Rootys and want to be notified – send a code to Twitter and you start receiving messages. Then later when you’re in a groove and not worried about missing stuff you can turn it off.
Thanks Pete, interesting suggestion, we’re going to look into it. Thanks for the lash frenzy piece too, its an interesting debate.
I would, potentially, variables allowing and not committing myself to anything, be interested in running something like this. Y’know, just to see if it can be done. ;)
We have a student from BCU that could work with you to research possibilities.
Re SXSW – cafe open 24hrs
check out: http://www.cafemagnolia.com/
The one on Congress is where there are loads of independent little shops.
Hugely interesting post and comments.
I’ve considered a very similar scenario for an app I’ve been working on for some time. I reckon there’s a vast niche there for the model that hits the nail on the head.
Russ: there’s no sorting by tag etc. at all in Twitter, so filtering is out. In fact, I could have used “tag” instead of “zone, filter, or channel” — it would have been less confusing that way perhaps.
The only sort of rough topic-indicator in use is the @username lexicon, which shows that a twitter is in response to another twitter. You can use that to follow twitter conversations back through the timeline.
Re: receiving lots of twitters at once, I’ve found that I do tend to stop text alerts on anyone who swamps me, and three texts in a row does feel a bit swampy.
I don’t know what 250 phones all receiving three twitter messages in a row would sound like, I’m guessing not great.
Would the festival be providing big sticks to batter the heads and/or phones of people who signed up for these notifications but didn’t set their phones to “Vibrate only” mode?
It could end up like the piece Jen and I went to see at Ars Electronica in 2001 – Dialtones
http://www.flong.com/projects/telesymphony/