If you’re staging an event or meeting and are thinking about how to make it really interactive, having a Twitter screen can be a nice talking point.
People can tweet, say, using a certain hashtag, and when they do their words will appear on the big screen for all to see.
To do this you’ll need to use a program that will display the tweets for you on a computer, and then simply hook the machine up to your TV screen or external monitor.
Twitterfall is one free, browser-based program that will display tweets in a visually-appealing way, with a big screen in mind.
You enter a search term, username or hashtag, select how you would like the tweets to display, and that’s the job done. What you see on the computer monitor is what you see on the TV screen (once you’ve plugged it in of course).
Whenever a new tweet is fired out, this will be picked up by Twitterfall and displayed at the top of the list, in the same way it would do if you were to search within Twitter by keyword or hashtag.
It’s also possible to filter your results by location, so maybe within 10 miles of where you are, and you can exclude certain words if you so wish.
Another nice touch is the ability to add a heading to your Twitterfall screen, such as “Use #thebigevent hashtag on Twitter to have your say”. If you do this, it makes it obvious what the screen is all about, and people know how to display their tweet to everyone who’s present.
When you are in ‘Presentation Mode’ on Twitterfall, you’ll notice that in the top left and top right corners of the screen there are ‘Twitterfall.com’ and ‘Exit’ links – it’s not possible to remove these, but they are pretty unobtrusive and a small price to pay for an excellent free tool.
