What is Slide Tweet? A Powerpoint Add-In twittering slide titles. If you are not familiar with http://twitter.com I suggest to read the post “How to Twitter – First Steps and a Twitter Glossary” from Scott Hanselman. Why do I want to have an add-in for powerpoint twittering slide titles? Well, I had an idea and I will test it in the next talk I give. The idea is simpel to integrate the audience through Twitter while presenting content.

People can follow the tag specified in the beginning of the presentation and make comments, retweet or discuss the slide topic presented currently. Maybe I will use this to answer questions coming through twitter during the presentation, I’m not sure yet.

Here are some screenshots how this works. First you load any powerpoint you want to present and start the presentation. After this you will be asked if you want to twitter this deck.

shot1

After specifying credentials and the tag to use for the tweets, you are ready to go. During presentation slide titles will be twittered with the specified tag. The audience is able to follow this tag. Let’s assume we have a tag which is called #gac09. You can basically follow this tag using the twitter search functionality or any other twitter client able to search for tags.

shot4

The results will be shown and refreshed if new content for this tag is available.

shot5

You will see all tweets using the tag and not only the tweets by your presentation but also any tweets using the tag, replying on your tweets.

The audience could interact among each other and give also feedback via Twitter (at least this is the idea I had). That said, it makes sense to specify one or multiple tags to make the presentation unique (please no UUID).

I will see how it works on my next talk.

If you are a presenter and would like to try out this add-in you can. I have posted a resource page on my code gallery with the solution file: Slide Tweet. Please note that you need Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio Tools for Office and Powerpoint 2007 to run this sample. I have no really good setup so far, neither good error handling. Therefore enjoy with care.

One design decision I made. I always call to Twitter asynchronously with one exception. The last slide is posted synchronously, just to ensure that every call was made (so I even don’t utilize the callbacks).

Have fun and feedback welcome!