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Displaying a "wall" of live tweets to a group of people can be a powerful addition to a conference presentation, a classroom discussion, or a university commencement. There are several sites that specialize in providing a way to showcase a Twitter live stream in real-time. From free options to sophisticated paid services, here are some of the sites that I've used:
Monitter - It's a simple "search and display" service. When it's working, Monitter is great. However, I've found it to be slightly unreliable at times.
Tweetwall - Billing itself as "the best Tweetwall in the world," this service has a lot of options including: tweet moderation, event analytics, and an almost unreal speed when it comes to pulling in tweets. Tweetwall offers a 15% discount for higher education clients. The service has a per-day pricing structure for an event. It's basically the Ferrari-edition of tweet wall services. The backend stats remind me of the data that you can get from Hashtracking. Here's a clip of Tweetwall in action:
HootFeed by HootSuite - This is a terrific tweet wall service. It has a profanity filter, is fully customizable, and it scales to fit the size of your screen. While I've never used this free service for one of my talks, I plan on trying it out in the near future.
Tweetwally - It's super simple. Enter a hashtag and customize your tweet wall. Interestingly, Tweetwally allows you to "display images inline." That might make for some awkward moments at an event. Popular hashtags sometimes get spammed and an inappropriate image showing up on the tweet wall would be a great reason to deselect that particular option.
Twubs - A nifty feature from Twubs is that they offer a "moderated tweet ticker." According to their website, all you have to do is "register your hashtag" to get access to their service. For large events like conference keynotes and commencement celebrations, tweet moderation is a must.
TweetChat - It's probably more useful for synchronous chats on Twitter. However, TweetChat would definitely work as a tweet wall. All you would really need to do is increase the zoom on your browser so that the wall of tweets occupied the entire screen.
TweetBeam - Aesthetically, this is a nice looking tweet wall. While I really like TweetBeam, I probably won't use it at events. My focus for tweet walls is on the content that's being posted. TweetBeam seems to focus more on the look and feel of things.
Twitterfall - This site has been around for quite a while. I've used Twitterfall to live stream tweets at several events. It's extremely reliable and the font size can easily be increased for easy reading on large screens. In fact, it's pretty amazing how much you can do with Twitterfall, especially since it's free.
What service do you like to use to display a tweet wall?
By the way, here are some of my favorite backchannel tweets. These were posted while I was speaking!
It's true. I hope the Broadmoor has rectified this situation.
My ongoing Twitter-based relationship with JetBlue is legendary.
You are most welcome. Thanks for tweeting!
Do you tweet? Let's connect. Follow me on Twitter.
