I've been to many conferences over the years which have set up a dedicated back channel which has always added to my experience of the conference.

Twitter seems to be the back channel for SxSW and most people seem to be using it. I have an account but have never used it to tweet simply due to a lack of time and not wanting to start something which I simply won't be able to maintain in the longer term.

In my opinion the volume of traffic on Twitter about SxSW has made it unusable and has got to a level of noise where nobody would be able to keep up with  it and get any value from it. Some sessions have been setting up specific hash tags such as #kebab which does give you a more focused feed but these aren't always set up or widely published.

Tags: SxSW, Twitter