Minutes ago, The LiveTweeting Team wrapped up its first meeting at Seeqnce: discussing and preparing for the upcoming, end-user enabled, version 0.6 of LiveTweeting.
We started LiveTweeting about 9 months ago as a raison d’être at Le Web 2009 – an experiment in crowdsourcing real-time translation of English tweets to Arabic. The experiment was a major success as Arabic tweets filled the Twitter Feed screens in Paris. We were amazed by the way people spontaneously formed a community to drive the ‘engine’.
Then March 2010, LiveTweeting was upgraded to v0.5 in preparation for a ‘trending’ wager between Samer Karam and Omar Christidis. Samer had wagered Omar that he could trend the 2010 ArabNet Conference using LiveTweeting. And so LiveTweeting v0.5 was projected onto two 6×6 meter in-conference screens, to encourage the audience to tweet about the conference, during the conference. Much to our surprise, not only did LiveTweeting encourage ArabNet attendees to tweet, it also created hitherto unseen audience-speakers interactions, unlike anything witnessed even in the biggest tech conferences around the world! LiveTweeting had the unforeseen effect of elevating the audience to the level of the speakers, or perhaps ‘knocking the speakers down a notch’. As a result, and for two consecutive days, LiveTweeting trended (Top 5) #ArabNetME globally on Twitter.
As luck would have it, Beshr Kayali, LiveTweeting’s Lead Developer and Co-Founder, moved to Lebanon late July (2010). With The Team finally united in proximity, LiveTweeting was seeqnced with our sights set on the elusive ‘end-user enabled’ release.
Our progress will be blogged (weekly meh) here. Tune in for the journey as it unfolds…
—Beshr Kayali & Samer Karam—
LiveTweeting Overview
Founded December 2009
Working Team
- Director: Samer Karam
- Lead Developer: Beshr Kayali
Releases
- v0.4: December 2009 – Le Web 2009
- v0.5: March 2010 – ArabNet 2010
- v0.6: expected Q4 2010