Liverpool Twestival

11Sep09

What the hell is a Twestival? This is the question that kept going through my head as I walked into the Leaf Tea Shop & Bar on Parliament Street to be confronted by 60 people who were practically strangers. I say practically because a few of them I communicate with on an almost daily basis and when I say communicate, I mean Tweet.

Twitter is the online micro-blogging service that allows you to post onto the intertubes exactly what is on your mind, as long as what’s on your mind can be compressed into 140 characters or less. The platform itself has grown far beyond the imagination of the founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone to become a great way to follow like minded people, share links, track trends and rant. The thing about Twitter is that you never normally get to meet the people you follow. They just stay remote and distant; little profile pictures tweeting away and popping up in your Twitter feed every now and then. That is until now!

The idea of a Twestival is to gather together local Twitter users face-to-face to eat, drink and be merry. This is done all in the name of charity and is organized totally by a group of dedicated volunteers. The Liverpool Twestival was a massive amount of fun and a great place to chat and network with people I would never otherwise have had the opportunity to meet in the real world. Plus, over £600 was raised for Clatterbridge Cancer Research and I won a raffle prize of a great HDR Photography book by Pete Carr, who also just happened to be sitting at our table.

All in all it was a great evening and I want to say a massive thank you to @doubleshiny, @runpaintrunrun, @OddEssay, @petemc and @samthesham for keeping me company all evening and @m8nd1 for organizing such a fantastic event. Can’t wait for the next one.