  Twitter is often referred to as a backchannel for conferences. While the main
conference takes place in a physical setting, attendees and virtual attendees
socialize, introduce new ideas or broadcast information by microblogging on
Twitter. In this paper we analyze the scholars' Twitter use in 16 Computer
Science conferences over a timespan of five years. Our primary finding is that
over the years there are increasing differences with respect to conversation
use and information use in Twitter. We studied the interaction network between
users to understand whether assumptions about the structure of the
conversations hold over time and between different types of interactions, such
as retweets, replies, and mentions. While `people come and people go', we want
to understand what keeps people stay with the conference on Twitter. By casting
the problem to a classification task, we find different factors that contribute
to the continuing participation of users to the online Twitter conference
activity. These results have implications for research communities to implement
strategies for continuous and active participation among members.
