The annual MIX conference, where Microsoft showcases the latest and greatest technologies to the development community is now coming to an end. For many, the highpoints of the event are the keynote presentations, where Microsoft unveils their latest tools and technology. The keynotes are broadcast live across the internet and are followed by thousands of developers online as well as at the conference centre in Vegas. Unfortunately the keynotes both fell at a time when I was traveling home from work so I could not watch them live. However, I was able to follow the amazing buzz on twitter via the #mix11 hashtag.

Judging by the twitter buzz the two keynotes were very different, the first focusing on IE9 / IE10, HTML5 and a few other bits and pieces. The lack of Silverlight in the keynote frustrated quite a few followers and resulted in some pretty ridiculous journalism, for example ZDNETs Microsoft de-emphasizes Silverlight at Mix11. For many I think the second keynote is what they were waiting for with demonstrations of WP7 Mango and Silverlight 5 each of which will be bringing with them lots of exciting new features.

In order to capture the difference between the keynotes, I grabbed all the #mix11 tweets from April 12 (11,799) and April 13 (14,334), most of which were during the keynotes, and rendered them as a word cloud (using the lovely wordle):

I think the above images are a fascinating illustration of the two keynotes. The first is very busy, with many terms mentioned - although few do standout, HTML5 and IE10. Interestingly Silverlight and WP7 are highlighted in the cloud, even though neither were mentioned in the keynote. Most of the tweets mentioning these terms were along the lines of "What about Silverlight and WP7?". Day two was clearly the day of WP7, Silverlight, Mango and Kinect, these terms stand out a mile!

Regards, Colin E.