Tony has gone all mashup in the head and developed an app for Twitter that takes your (or someone else's) tweets and presents them as a slideshow, called Twittershow. I've had a play with it - I think this link will take you to my tweets as a slideshow.
To use it you need the RSS url of your Twitter feed - to find this, go to your public Twitter page (e.g. http://twitter.com/mweller). At the bottom is a link that says RSS - this then gives you a page with a URL like this: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/7127162.rss
Slot this into Twittershow and away you go. Doing it made me laugh, because I'm convinced that for all the careful preparation I put in to my presentations, it would be just as meaningful if I just stuck up my, or someone else's tweets and talked around them. That aside though, I still don't get when I would actually use it, but I'm often slow on this kind of thing. What it does evidence though is that openness releases creativity - I'm pretty sure an app to do presentations would never have come up on the functional spec of a closed Twitter system, but release the API (and of course, release the data through RSS), and look what happens. Sure, it may be pointless, but then again it may be something really cool...
Hrm. Can you have multiple people on the same Twitter? It might be neat to have everybody Twitter ideas/thoughts during a presentation (class or meeting) and then use the slideshow to be able to focus on those Twitters and talk about them more in depth.
Posted by: Fazia Rizvi | 14/04/2008 at 05:35 PM
Hi Fazia. I guess you could solve this the Twitter end - Tony's thing is only taking an RSS feed, so you could aggregate the RSS feeds of several people. Or you could get them to use hashtags, and then make that the feed.
Martin
Posted by: Martin | 17/04/2008 at 09:09 AM