With the 2017 INFORMS Computing Society Conference in Austin around the corner, I was looking for useful way to make a binary joke and decided to write about tweeting.
For a long time I used Twitter as I would use Linkedin (that is, if Linkedin worked): for networking and letting people know about something going on where I was. This type of tweet, which I now call “Look what you are missing”, is quite useful.
Now @akazachk talks about generalized intersection cuts from final points #informsos2016 #orms pic.twitter.com/jeb2LZzwsn
— Thiago Serra (@thserra) March 17, 2016
I still use Twitter in that way, particularly when I am busy keeping session time (like above) or trying to understand something that is new to me. However, I started paying attention to other people’s tweets and decided to use it in a more productive way for me and others: taking notes of what seem to be the takeaway message or good to know.
Haochen Luo shows an interesting hierarchy of sets with respect to mixed-integer representability #informs2016 #orms pic.twitter.com/4i5dtKOGpx
— Thiago Serra (@thserra) November 13, 2016
Conflict analysis yields higher performance improvement in problems that take longer to solve #mip2016 pic.twitter.com/wuFQv874qj
— Thiago Serra (@thserra) May 25, 2016
An interesting idea by Adrian Vladu: generalize Charatheodory thm as an approx for fewer points #informsos2016 #orms pic.twitter.com/J4r3mz9hVD
— Thiago Serra (@thserra) March 19, 2016
Yanjun Li proves that determining if a problem is infeasible from Gomory-Chvatal cuts is NP-complete at #ismp2015 pic.twitter.com/d2RiFFRxSR
— Thiago Serra (@thserra) July 16, 2015
But there is another – more entertaining – way of using Twitter in conferences…
Disappointed that @thserra didn’t live-tweet his own poster introduction at #mip2016 pic.twitter.com/khE2MHOi8i
— Jeff Linderoth (@JeffLinderoth) May 23, 2016
I still have to figure how to tweet while giving a talk. Talk would entail 100 types of tweets!
Thiago Serra 
How to live tweet your talk:
1. Use Beamer to build the slides.
2. Include “speaker notes” for each slide.
3. Put a link in the speaker notes for each slide that runs a BASH/Python/whatever script that burps up a tweet written when you wrote the slide.
4.Surreptitiously click each tweet link when you’re on the slide.
The real question, as usual, is not the technological “how” but the sociological “why”.