My head hurts.

So last night was the first ever London Twitter Meetup. I think it’s ok for me to say it was a success because everyone I spoke to last night seemed to have fun and the buzz on Twitter this morning is that it was a good night out.

Early on a few people assumed I have some connection with Twitter. I don’t. I just love to twitter and think it’s one of the best things to happen to the Internet in years. I use it daily not only to keep in touch with friends, but to make new contacts and keep abreast of cool stuff across the globe. I’ve been on LinkedIn for ages and it’s done squat. Facebook I’m warming to, but I’m never going to be a fanboy. Twitter however has given me work and greatly expanded the network of interesting people across London and beyond that I have fun tapping into. Sure there’s software out there that can do more, but for me Twitter is all I need. If you’re not using it you really are missing out.

Last night we had somewhere between 30 or 40 people gather at Ishtar just off Baker Street. I’d mentioned my plans for this kind of event a few times, but when the guys at TrustedPlaces heard about it they immediately offered to provide the venue and sponsor the event. This meant rather than some sweaty Soho pub we were treated to a spacious Turkish restarant, free beer and food. So thanks to both Walid and Soks and of course the staff at Ishtar who ran around all evening making sure we had enough wine and even nipped out to buy a cable when we had trouble throwing Twittervision on the wall (which I believe was the only hitch of the evening).

We had a bunch of people from Yahoo! along with Annie Mole from Going Underground, Ian Forrester from the BBC / Cubic Garden and a nice international feeling thanks to the new French and Austalian friends I made. Sandrine has already posted about the event (while I was nursing a sore head) and Nik has some photos up. My own got increasingly out of focus as the night wore on… damn beer!

Also present and correct were Raphael, Darika, Judith, James, Sumit, Jeremy and of course a bunch of other people who I spoke with at length but forgot to get Moo cards from. If you were there and I didn’t mention you somewhere in this post give me a nudge.

When I told Irina about the event a few weeks ago she suggest I film it for Geek Entertainment TV in San Francisco. I dutifully turned up with my ancient camcorder and Jess gracefully agreed to play Irina for the evening. Then Richard turns up with a HUGE professional video camera and I immediately gave him a field commision as the evening’s official cameraman. He and Jess worked the room ALL night and we have heaps of footage. GETV need exactly four minutes of funny stuff. We have 35 minutes of Twitter love to edit. We’ll try and do that this weekend, but we’ll also be finding somewhere online to host ALL the video we shot as everyone was very articulate and detailed on just why they love Twitter so we we’d hate to see it go to waste.

TrustedPlaces also have some prizes to give out, but we need to go through the Tweets from the night before we decide who gets a card. And Rob and I also gave away some copies of The Raw Shark Texts on behalf of Kwint.

I thought last night that the sign of a good event was that people stuck around long after the food was gone. Then a lot of people refused to leave at all. But this morning I realised that not a single person bothered to ask about the proposed bellydancer… so I’m taking that as confirmation that as London geek events go this wasn’t a bad one.

Thanks to everyone who came (some people really travelled!) and do let me know what worked and what didn’t so that if we throw a follow up event we make it even better. Cheers!

Oh, and as ever you can follow me on Twitter here.