Going Solo

I discovered six groups a few days before Going Solo Lausanne, when Stowe created a channel for the conference. I’m happy to announce that they are sponsoring Going Solo Leeds and helping us get set up with their service, as it was pretty quickly obvious they were a really useful service for an event like ours.

If you already use Twitter (and you should!) you won’t have too much trouble understanding the utility of six groups. The Going Solo six groups livecommunity aggregates tweets from members of the community which are hashtagged #goingsolo. If you don’t have a Twitter account, you can of course participate directly on the six groups site.

Six groups also provides code which allows us to display the latest message sent to the Going Solo Livestream, and gives easy access to the functionality:

So, in practice?

• register for a six groups account (you may use OpenID)
• join the Going Solo community
• edit your profile (add your Twitter ID in there so that @sixgroups can follow you!), add a photo, and look through community members to start adding friends
• adjust your Twitter settings so that your tweets are captured into the livestream
• for your tweet to appear in the livestream, use the #goingsolo (that’s a hashtag) somewhere in your tweet
• of course, the livestream is available through RSS.

And:

• you may also post a message directly from anywhere on the Going Solo websites, by using the six groups toolbar which appears at the top of each page
• if you enjoy being identified as something like “Gast88684”, you don’t even have to register! 😉

If you would like to add the Going Solo six groups bar to your site (and become a partnersite), all you need to do is copy the widget code into your template, just before </body>.

Looking forward to having you all take part in the livecommunity! Use the comments here for questions if you have any.