Expanded Twitter Integration
One of the first questions people ask themselves when they’re getting ready to go to a conference is “who do I know that will be there?” The shame of it is that there are so many social networks out there that know who you know, but there isn’t an effective way to figure out which of those people are attending the same event you are.
That’s why we’re proud to introduce our expanded Twitter integration today.
If you’ve provided Pathable with your Twitter name when you register, we’ll automatically tell you which of your Twitter friends are attending. Just view your own profile.
This can help you find other interesting people to meet, as well. Visit the profile of someone you respect, and you’ll be able to see which of their Twitter friends are attending.
This is all built with the public Twitter API using publicly accessible data. Pathable never asks you for or stores your Twitter password.
The next question you’re likely to ask, after “who’s going” is “what are they talking about?” Pathable can help you there, as well. We now import all the tweets that include your event’s hash tag and display it on the front page. Plus, we offer a separate view that will show you all the tweets from anyone at the event, whether or not it contains the event hash tag.
Both of these views are updated in near real-time. You’ll see your tweets on the site in less than a minute, so this view can be used as a on-site Twitter projection feed.
This follows on other recent Twitter integration we’ve done, including adding a “Tweet Profile” link to each user’s profile that encourages them to let their friends know that they’re attending your event, creating your own personal viral marketing team.
Now we need to wrap this blog post up and tweet about it.
This is fantastic! How do you know which tweets to grab?
Thanks, Randy. We grab a) all tweets with the event’s hash tag in them and b) all tweets from people at the event, whether or not they have the hash tag.
When people fill out their profile, we ask for their Twitter name, which is how we know who, on Twitter, is attending.
[...] that Pathable has made some key investments in Twitter integration recently, including a “which of my Twitter friends are also at this event” feature and real-time Twitter updates from attendees, I’m encouraged that we’re [...]
Jordan, hey is there any function to tell me what conferences my friends are signing up for or attending, even if I have not signed up? Twitter is a great tool for discovery, but easy to miss good information in fire hose data stream. It would be sweet if you could build some sort of function to let me know other conferences that my friends are either talking about or planning on attending (even if the conference was not using Pathable). This function may be pie in the sky, but would be a pretty cool application to let me know conferences that others in my sphere of influence are attending and what might be worth my time and investment. The tool could potentially be a great marketing angle for Pathable.
Great suggestion, Craig. The closest we come today is the “Tweet Profile” prompt we provide (i.e., we encourage people to tweet the fact that they’re attending so you would find out about it). Longer term, we’d like to explore some of the angles you describe.