I’ve gone and tried to follow the Apple launching event yesterday. Robert Scoble posted earlier his reasons for not going while he had a ticket, mainly because he had way better access to the backchannel, video, photos and opinions from everyone who did go by staying home. Since I obviously had no possibility to be there I felt myself a little on par with him by following it online :-)
I started with firing up Seesmic Web, an online twitter client. I wanted to open some columns with my followers, some twitter lists of people who were going to be there and a search query on “Apple” or “Tablet”. Unfortunately the web app is quite the memory hog and my computer grinded to a full halt when I opened more than four columns. I then opened the same things in tabs of Firefox and that worked very smoothly. I also opened the live coverage of GDGT, Engadget and Gizmodo. GDGT had the fastest and most complete coverage (including images) and Gizmodo the funniest, so I soon dropped Engadget. Twitter was predicted by many to cave under the pressures of the event. Although this didn’t happen they did shut down the list features altogether, which was a real shame because now I had to miss out on local commentary. Best video and audio stream was provided by Leo Laporte’s TWiT.tv, but I found the website hard to reach and when I did manage to connect the video needed a lot of buffering and lacked in quality. I preferred the images of GDGT.
Alright, that sums up how I followed the event live. I’ll let you know what I thought of the iPad soon in a new post. I’m confident I didn’t miss out on any information during the keynote speech, getting my information from both GDGT and Gizmodo. To be perfectly honest I don’t think it really adds much to follow the event live, over reading about on blogs afterwards. One advantage is that you can place comments in perspective, but with Twitter’s lists down that didn’t work anyway. It does make sense if you just want to know everything first and it was a nice experiment to see how much information you can get online. Have you followed it online or do you think it doesn’t add anything to follow it real-time?
Image source: GDGT
