#SFLCC wrap-up, Twitter insights

As you know from my last minute post on Friday, I spent a part of this past weekend in southern Florida for the South Florida .NET Code Camp 2010. As usual, it was a great time, with lots of eager .NET learners and interesting content. And while it looked like some of the speakers might not make it due to the storms in the North East, I think almost everyone made it to the event. A big thanks to everyone that came to the Code Camp, especially all of you that packed my two sessions!

Meanwhile, I learned, or rather re-enforced, another little tidbit on this trip: Nobody in South Florida uses Twitter.

I’ve polled audiences for well over a year now asking two questions:

1. How many of you “use” Twitter? That is, do you tweet?
2. How many of you “lurk” on Twitter (you read, but don’t tweet)?

Those that don’t respond to either question are either A) already sleeping, or B) presumed to not use Twitter at all (read or write). Traditionally, I’ve found that in a “normal” developer audience, no matter where in the world I’ve done this poll, only 10% (or so) of the audience does anything with Twitter. In other words, In a room of 50 people, 5 people (on a good day) use Twitter.

Florida was different. In two rooms of 50+ people, only 1 person admitted to using Twitter. More reinforcement of the idea that Twitter is a much smaller active community than the numbers suggest.

Telerik Prizes via Twitter

This created a bit of problem for my swag scheme. To win swag from my sessions, I told everyone to simply follow me on Twitter and on Monday (today) I would select two random winners. Fortunately, with a little coaching, I managed to bring a small chunk of South Florida on to Twitter, and I’ve got my random winners:

@marquinakat
@gardavis

Congrats to both! You each get a Telerik Premium Collection. And you may now resume not using Twitter.

Thanks again for attending my sessions and feel free to grab the session resources below. See you next year!

Resources from my sessions

Being Productive with Telerik Extensions for MVC
[Slides (PDF)]

ASP.NET Fundamentals: ViewState Tips & Tricks (v2)
[Slides (PDF)] [Code (Zip)]