I admit I was skeptical when signing up for a Twitter account last spring. Another site to check when I pop online? Did I really want to commit to that? I quickly fell down the rabbit hole that is Twitter when I discovered how easy it was to stay up-to-date with concurrent conference events during last year’s Annual meeting in Chicago, which I attended in person. I was unable to make it to Washington D.C. this year, but the tidbits posted by participants who used the #ala10 hashtag helped to satisfy my curiosity. The fun continued with #virtala10, the hashtag used by attendees of the Virtual Conference sessions on Wednesday, July 7th, and Thursday, July 8th. I added both hashtags to my list of saved Twitter searches so that real-time updates were never more than a click away. (Unfortunately, Twitter limits the search availability of “older” tweets. Act now if you want to catch what was tagged!)

During this spring’s PLA conference in Portland, Oregon, Gretchen Kolderup observed that the stream of tweets tagged with #pla10 could be likened to “a roomful of people talking at and not with each other.” The stream for this year’s Annual followed a similar trend. Whenever I scanned the most recent tweets, I didn’t catch many back-and-forth exchanges using either hashtag. Messages tended to be brief bursts of ideas and resources gained from sessions rather than ongoing discussions. A year’s worth of following various conference activities through Twitter has given me the sense that this is often the case with on-the-go conference updates, but I don’t mind the fragmentation. Even if conference tweets don’t spark an in-the-moment conversation through @-replies or the site’s direct message feature, they can foster connection among Twitter users at a later time. Aside from harvesting links to conference notes or video footage, one of my favorite ways to make use of the stream is simply to see who is using it. Conference hashtags are a great resource for finding fellow librarians, technology buffs, and booklovers to chat with long after conference events have wrapped up.

There are some elements of the ALA Annual experience the Twitter stream can’t replicate, of course. That wicked case of conference shoulder from lugging bags around? Can’t say I missed that! Face-to-face interaction with people who care about library services as much as I do? I wish I could have had that opportunity this summer, and hope to see you all in New Orleans next year. Many, many thanks to everyone who indulged those of us at home with updates from this year’s physical and virtual conferences!