bill.cava.us » twitter

Twitter Lists Lacking Community Curation

bill — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:55:36 +0000

The term “Twitter List” is trending on Twitter today, looks like the feature has been opened up to everyone. I was included in an early release wave and have been playing with it for a bit now. Generally I like it and think it’s a very useful feature, but it’s more interesting to note what was not included in it.

The ultimate value of Twitter Lists is for converting potential ties (people you don’t know yet) into weak or strong ties (see Granovetter’s Theory of the Strength of Weak Ties).

Delicious does this well. On Delicious, each person has their own local tagspace (all bookmarks tagged by that individual), but contributes to a global pool of bookmarks visible to everyone. For example, I can subscribe to the bookmarks tagged “openid” by Jon Udell by visiting his stream here http://delicious.com/judell/openid, and see the global pool of all bookmarks tagged “openid” here http://delicious.com/tag/openid.

When I access Jon’s local tagspace, I do so knowing that there will be fewer but typically higher quality bookmarks. When I access the global tagspace, I recognize there will be more to sift through, but I can use it to discover new people interested in “openid”.

Translating this to Twitter, the Lists feature provides a “local tagspace” and there is no notion of a “global tagspace”. While the signal-to-noise ratio of the local list is greater, it decreases the opportunity for further discovering other users and other lists. This hole opens the door for a third part to step in to categorize and aggregate Lists across users (updated: Listorious launches attempting to do just this).

In a nutshell, I like the local List concept. I imagine the notion of a global List was left out because of the ability for spammers to abuse it. Ultimately, Bing and Google see the holy grail for Lists being a service that automatically pulls in the best tweets for a given category or term. I can see value in that. But I think Delicious style community curation is a powerful discovery mechanism relevant to Twitter and, I would argue, is lacking in the current implementation of Twitter Lists.

uber extensible twitter client

bill — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 20:21:57 +0000

Dear lazyweb, i would like an extensible twitter client by christmas please. Think FireFox for Twitter. Seesmic and TweetDeck have an opportunity here to gain significant adoption by creating a developer ecosystem around its client, making it possible for developers to build niche plugins w/o burdening the core product with cruft. Not only that, but think of all the applications currently in development that will have some type of “activity stream” — without an open client, we’ll see a flood of new clients repeating the same functionality over and over. It’s only a matter of time before we see an open client, but lazyweb, it would make a nice present for christmas.

simplicity kills twitter?

bill — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 21:33:31 +0000

As someone who fancies minimalism I dig Twitter’s concise feature set, tho I knew it was only a matter of time before an uber-twitter showed itself. @cmswire heralded it’s arrival in a post about a feature rich microblogging site called Yonkley. It let’s you:

* create a microblogging site around any subject area (a twitter vertical).

* customize, brand, theme

* add adverts

* increase the character limit to above twitter’s 140 characters

Is the answer for twitter to bulk up on features? In some areas, YES! Hey Twitter, get people search working! Beyond that, no. Twitter just needs to start better promoting the many sites out there built on their APIs. My favorite, qwitter.

discovered via @cmswire Yonkly: The Next Twitter Killer?