Tried out the Twitter in a side-bar trick with Flock today. Running a workshop for computing academics as one of their lunchtime briefings. Seemed to go very well with a couple of dozen turning up and lots of input. Better yet, having them Twitter questions and comments meant that I had a record of them next day when I tried to respond to the queries I didn't know the answer to!

Of course, computing academics might not be a 'typical' audience, but it was a promising start and not as distracting or useless as it might have been.