The Utility of Tweeting

I never thought I'd be writing under this title, but tweeting definitely has its uses. I was recently at a conference in Budapest where several members of the audience were tweeting from their cell phones. At the same time, the conference organizers were showing the tweet thread on the screen behind the panel. Great idea. Unfortunately, the tweeters mainly limited themselves to reporting to the outside world some key points being made by the panel.
This is where I got frustrated. I had several substantive comments to make on various things that the panel were saying. For example, this was a discussion on the subject, "Has Translation Technology a Future?" and one of the panelists asked herself whether technical writers had tool standards and how they used them, only to have another tell her he was certain they did. It's frustrating to have the parallel activity of technical writer and to know that aside from ISO 9000, they don't, and that standard is too sketchy to be of any use. As for authoring itself, the best they have is an architecture, DITA, and approaches like info-mapping. That would have made a perfect tweet, and would have livened up the debate.
Maybe next time I'll be equipped.