ISMB coverage on Twitter? It’s possible there was…

Peter writes:

I wonder if part of the drop off is live bloggers moving to platforms like Twitter? I can tell you it seemed like there were almost as many tweets for one SIG (#bosc2011) as for the whole of #ISMB / #ECCB2011, and I personally didn’t post anything to FriendFeed but posted lots on Twitter.

Well, there’s a problem with using Twitter for analysis of conference coverage. Let’s try searching for ISMB-related tweets using the twitteR package:

library(twitteR)
ismb <- searchTwitter("ismb", 1000)
length(ismb)
# [1] 30

If we can't archive, how can anyone else?

30? Are we using twitteR properly? Running the same search at the Twitter website gives roughly the same results, plus this unhelpful message.

I like Twitter – as a real-time communication tool. As a data archive? Forget it.