One of things I struggled with when I signed up for twitter was the lack of easy way to find people to follow.
I remember (unsuccessfully) googling ‘twitter’ + ‘keyword’ in the hope I would find some like-minded twitterers. Eventually I found the twitter fan wiki which is a great resource but quite techy and requires patience.
My suggestion for solving this problem?
Twitter Communities
Twitterers could categorise themselves by subject-based community (technology, music, photography, food, politics etc).
As well as the public timeline each community could have a timeline, along with a list of members starting with most recently joined.
This would be great for newbies as they try and figure out what Twitter is all about and for old-timers and newbies alike as a way of finding people to follow.
What do people think? Is this something that can be set up as a stand-alone app? Does something like this already exist?
I think it’s a cool idea… do hashtags provide some of that functionality? They don’t seem to be that widely used, but could be v. useful for tracking topics…
Sx
I have seen some people (those with a large list of followers) using self categories at the start of their messages. I’ve seen things like:
:london
:SxSW
:coders
Etc… so yes, I think people could welcome it, targeting just the niche you want to hear for that specific tweet would certainly reduce noise on the main channel.
The other thing is that I feel filters would be good, so I could filter out say “killer app” or “nice”.. you know reducing noise about things you do not want to hear.
Just some thoughts for ya.
Chris
Ooo…you mean like Yahoo Groups, or is that too Web 1.0 to be relevant
Jenny,
Would hashtags (http://www.hashtags.org/) do the trick? It requires that everyone follows (and is followed by) the hashtags Twitter user, but apart from that it would seem to do what you want.
Cheers,
Tim
I think it’s a great idea.
I use http://terraminds.com/twitter/
and http://tweetscan.com/index.php
Both could be defined as a push method to find twit pals with similar interests.
I completely agree there should be an easier way to connect people such as Stumble does.
Cheers
Julius
I think what you are hitting on here is the fact that twitter would benefit from additional social networking applications – specifically ones that enable you to find like-minded, or at least like-interested, people.
Applications like Facebook contain this kind of metadata on users. Once someone manages to wedge this open and combine it with real-time communications tools like twitter, life will get very interesting!
Another thought is Jeremiah Owyang’s fairly famous post:
Some Conversations have shifted to Twitter – there are some good keys into members of various different twitter sub-communities who introduce themselves there.
Hope that helps (sorry if there was a problem with my previous comment :s)
-Benjamin
Try here:
http://twitterpacks.pbwiki.com/
Sorry about the delay in these comments appearing btw – wordpress forgot to tell me about them.
hashtags are great for identifying topics but not quite what I mean here.
Twitterpacks is much closer to what I’m proposing – shame the functionality isn’t available on Twitter though.