Over the past couple of days, I’ve had a good increase in the number of people who are following me on Twitter. Some of this is due to automated bots that pick up words from my blog and tweets (that’s shorthand for messages sent via Twitter). Many others are due to some diligence on my part. On Sunday, it dawned on me that a good way to broaden my reach would be to look at who my friends were following and follow people who I either know or who looked interesting. After several hours, I had added about 30 new people to my “following” list. Then, as if by magic, more than a few decided that they would like to follow me.
I don’t know if it was the cute cat avatar I have, the engaging (NOT!) bio I wrote for Twitter, or morbid curiosity from people hoping to see me crash and burn in cyberspace. Regardless, I was very happy with the results. However, this brought up an unintended consequence. How does one deal with a significantly larger volume of twitter messages?
I went from 1 message every 10 or 15 minutes to 2 every few minutes. Some of the more prolific Tweeters could send out 10 an hour! Initially, I was overwhelmed and was tempted to stop following so many people. Then I realized how rude it would be since many of them were kind enough to reciprocate my initial request.
I’d been steered towards TweetDeck (thanks @exbor!) as a good way to manage large numbers of tweets. It allows you to group senders and display just certain groups or the entire stream in separate columns in their app. This is a handy way of not missing important tweets from family and friends while allowing less significant items to be viewed at my leisure.
Still, I detected a certain disconnect. I saw people from completely different spheres sending messages about a huge variety of topics. Several times, I wondered whether, if 2 people were following each other, what would they say about each other’s ideas? There is a protocol in Twitter called re-tweeting (RT for the uninitiated) where you can re-broadcast a message to your followers. It’s a very manual process and I imagine that lots of opportunities are lost.
I’m sure that there are smarter people out there who have either thought about how to harness tweets flying through the Ethernet. However, I have not personally seen any apps or projects that directly address the issue of aggregating and prioritizing them and I think that this is where the real power of social networking rests. So, I’d like to posit a question to all my readers to see if we can start an ongoing discussion.
Is it possible to develop a Twitter application that harnesses the concepts of 1) tweeter reputation, 2) areas of expertise, 3) consistency, and 4) accuracy?
If I get enough feedback, perhaps we can move the discussion to another forum. Please let me know what you think.
*** Note ***
Due to the start of school, my posts may become more infrequent. I’ll still be sending out tweets announcing new posts and also changing my Facebook to reflect new items. You can either subscribe to the RSS feed of join my Facebook blog network to get updated. If you choose RSS, would you please drop me a comment so I know that the drop in pages views isn’t due to disinterest?
So That's Life? 