David Saranga (@davidsaranga), former consul for media and public affairs at the Israeli Consulate in New York, spoke about how they had hosted the first ever governmental press conference last December on Twitter when fighting in Gaza was occurring. The press conference, covered by mainstream media worldwide including the New York Times and the blogosphere, consisted of four people on laptops. The New York Times printed some of the questions they took, which they answered in Twitter shorthand:

Question from peoplesworld: 40 years of military confrontation hasn’t brought security to Israel, why is this different?
Answer from israelconsulate: We hav 2 prtct R ctzens 2, only way fwd through neogtiations, & left Gaza in 05. y Hamas launch missiles not peace?

backlotops: 1 side has to stop. Why continue what hasn’t worked (mass arial/grnd retaliation)? Arab Peace Initiative?
israelconsulate: we R pro nego. crntly tlks r held w the PA + tlks on the 2 state soln. we talk only w/ ppl who accept R rt 2 live.

At Tuesday’s #140conf, Saranga said that they had quickly accrued 4,000 followers after announcing the December Twitter press conference, though he acknowledged that numbers are not the only form of measurement.

“You might say that quantity is not the only criteria. I agree….Around 20 percent of the people were either bloggers or journalists or leader opinions in the social media world. In other words we had here, or we have here a direct tool in order to multiply the message. Every tweet or every message that we upload there are around 20 percent of those followers, of those 7,000 followers… who can multiply the message. And this is a very, very important tool for us as a government, it’s very important tool for us as a consulate in order to bring our message.”

Saranga said that he was warned by Jersusalem not to neglect conventional media.

“It’s not one instead of the other. It’s the fusion here which is important. You can take one message that appears on the conventional media and amplify it by bringing it to a new platform, in this case Twitter. And people started to understand it. People started to understand that we’re talking here about joining the old media with the new methods [of] the new media…
“As I said, people can talk directly to a government. In the past when people were thinking about a government or about the representative of a certain government they would think about the entity with no face, with no name. All of a sudden Twitter allows us to have a face. People know who are the people they are talking to. Once again, it’s a revolution.”

Allowing people to connect in ways they hadn’t connected before and to form new relationships was a theme throughout many of Tuesday’s talks. Porter Gale (@porter VA), vice president of marketing for Virgin America – the first airline to have wifi on all of its airplanes – told the story of a new doctor who had just graduated from medical school tweeting about her excitement to have graduated and to be flying Virgin America. Virgin America retweeted her tweet and got someone seated three rows in front of her to buy her champagne. (I hope the generous passenger in row 4 got a drink on the house.)

Gale’s observation about Twitter connecting people was a popular one with attendees and retweeted multiple times:

buffyjhamilton RT @isteconnects: RT @NMHS_Principal: Social media allows 4vconversations & rltshps. to occur/form that never would have @porterVA #140conf

Cellist Peter Gregson (@petergregson) played a piece while real time tweets commenting on the music played on the screen behind him. A classical musical performance is usually one-way experience, but the interactive nature was popular with attendees:

patrick_koppula @petergregson cello performance is captivating excellent use of twitter visuals to enhance listening. wish he could play more!

One of the biggest applause lines came during the talk on Google Wave when it was announced that attendees would be receiving a Google Wave invite. The Wave is still in Beta, but giving all the attendees at the #140conf an invite was probably a wise move since they were, judging by the simultaneous tweets with the #140conf hashtag, a prolific, collaborative, early adopter-type target audience most likely to use the Wave. At one point, #140conf was a top trending topic on Twitter.

The conference, organized by Jeff Keni Pulver (@JeffPulver) is continuing today with additional talks on “The making of: twittamentary,” “The making of an Internet (twitter) Celebrity” and “Twitter for Rockstars.”