In February I organized a pecha kucha style panel discussing topics related to law librarianship in the digital age and I ran a live competition looking for who could tweet the most about the panel. The prize was a copy of the book Law Librarianship in the Digital Age which was appropriate as the panel of speakers was made up of many of the contributing authors. It turned out to be a great way to get people excited and engaged with the speakers and it worked really well, resulting in many people tweeting about our discussion. Therefore, I wanted a way to display the live tweets as they were coming in to keep everyone excited about the contest. But I had a very hard time finding a good, free application which would enable me to project the display I wanted. Since then I've found four tools that will easily allow you to display a live tweet wall as the tweets come in, whether it's for an event you're hosting, for your library's flat screen TV display, or simply for following a topic.
1) HootFeed
This fantastic service is provided by HootSuite and is absolutely free. Simply enter a keyword or words you'd like to display tweets about and click "Launch". You'll notice that HootFeed also has an optional profanity filter which may really come in handy on conference day!
2) Tweet Beam
This service is definitely the most visually appealing of all the tweet walls available. Simply enter a hashtag or keyword you'd like to include and get ready to behold an image assembly of Twitter profile pics of everyone who is currently discussing that topic. As each tweet comes in it is displayed front and center with the user's profile pic.
3) Twitterfall
This application is the most highly customizable of any in this space. You can adjust tweet text sizes, decide whether to include retweets, set the speed for display, set exclusions and geolocations and much more. You can search for multiple keywords or hashtags with this one.
4) Twubs
The Twubs service will allow you to follow a hashtag and also moderate tweets before they show up in your tweet wall. In addition, the have several useful conference tools what can be downloaded after you've registered your hashtag such as a Moderated Fullscreen Tweet Wall.