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What About a Random Twitter and/or Twitter Gallery?
As it appears that Twitter is staying around for a while, I have a couple ideas on how to improve the ability for each person using Twitter to find new people to follow. Twitter could become a new networking tool over time. We know that right now there are the following ways to find others:
- Click one of my current "following" –> click one of their "following"
- Search for a term "pizza" or "san francisco"
- The Atari 2600 "blocks" application which lets you span out from your "following"
But the search has issues – for example – people classify their location as "nyc" or "new york" or "yankee-ville", etc. And sometimes it’s nice to find someone who might not be in your current set (you know live outside your box?). And except for the search, the other options all are based on who is already in my set.
I would like to propose two simple ideas which I am guessing can easily be accomplished using the Twitter API. The first idea is a random search similar to StumbleUpon. In fact, StumbleUpon Twitter might be a great expansion for Garrett and the team. Instead of upvoting a site or video, you could add the person to your network.
The second proposal is to create a gallery/directory of each of us (if we decide to participate). This would allow people to find others in categories they are interested in without using a search hoping that the other person entered the terms the same way you are thinking of them.
If they are already available, I couldn’t find them. Do you think this would help you find new connections that you might not otherwise have? Check out our previous Twitter coverage.
Never mind that Twitter only came popular because a couple of prominent bloggers promoted them and the sheep followed, who cares about Twitter now?
Fluff like Twitter has no place on the net, the people that hailed it as the next big thing are actually dumber than the service itself.
Now you want people to be able to randomly stalk you as your post suggests. Networking tool? I’m a web marketer too, but the thought of spamming Twitter too and become more popular at the same time is so old already. It’s like the guy that wants to be your friend on Facebook so they can peddle their crap on you later.
The sooner crap like Twitter vacates the internet – the better.
Never liked Twitter from the first day, laughed when the experts talked it up — loving it more now that Twitter is facing a slow death as their 10 minutes of fame is clearly up.
Funny how the same experts that hailed Twitter as the next big thing now talk up other crap now…. Yawn..
Thanks Lonely – I do agree that Twitter is not mainstream like Google is and believe me, I haven’t loved it (see my earlier posts) but I do think it has some possibilities. Scoble believes it’s a chat room, not sure I agree with that either (I have been chatting since mud days). It is important to realize that many of the tech "experts" are using it and so I think it’s important to use it so as to communicate with them.
"Funny how the same experts that hailed Twitter as the next big thing now talk up other crap now…. Yawn.."
lol – i was thinking that last night regarding facebook :)
Loren (www.lorenheiny.com) is working on an ink add-on to Twitter that makes for some additional fun. See http://www.tabletpcpost.com/inkgram/ and try for yourself. You’ll need to have a flickr account, too. The product is not done, but is fun to add to the little tweets sounded throughout the day. His work with GTalk is coming along, too.
Thanks for the explanation Chris – to me the stumble idea is to join a person for then you get the real-time aspect you mention.
I am not sure I completely agree with your friends idea – look at Mashable for example – they use it as a way to get out new posts immediately – so it’s a business use – which I wrote about earlier. I would say I use it about 60% for business posts. What I find is that it’s not a chat room like Scoble believes because a chat room is a 2-way conversation. I say x, you reply y. Here it’s I say x, everyone listens and I might get a y back. It’s more Speaker’s Corner in London.
My "friends" don’t use twitter – we use skype/aim/email/chat/irc – but I know people that care about what I am doing do along with others. You can’t tell me all 6,000 people on Robert’s list are really friends. I bet maybe 1% are.
Twitter’s longevity will be around finding new people – and of course for those who are ego driven and believe people care about what they are doing at this exact moment. And I wonder how quickly people will get bored of hearing about what tea someone drank this morning.
Hey Allen,
While these ideas have some merit, they kind of run against the more serendipitious/real-time aspect of Twitter. I mean, a stumbling idea is interesting to think about, but in practice probably wouldn’t be that compelling, since it’d end up in a lot of dead ends. Just watch the public timelines — there’s a lot of stuff on there that simply isn’t that interesting, except to the group of friends who know the publisher.
That’s why folks like LonelyBloggers don’t get it. If you have no friends, Twitter won’t work for you. If you do happen to have, say, three or four friends, and they all decide to use it (as opposed to all using Facebook or MySpace, let’s say, or even instead of email), Twitter becomes really useful and interesting.
As far a gallery goes, it might be interesting to be able to add taste preferences to your profile and then pivot to find other people through those tags… but then that kind of goes against the personal use of Twitter (which seems to be the majority of folks, just like with MySpace).
You say:
“Twitter’s longevity will be around finding new people – and of course for those who are ego driven and believe people care about what they are doing at this exact moment. And I wonder how quickly people will get bored of hearing about what tea someone drank this morning.”
I fundamentally disagree with this.
Perhaps it’s just my perception, but I actually think more people use Twitter to stay in touch with smaller groups of friends — via IM, email (direct messages), SMS, Web and API Apps — than they do for ego-feeding purposes. In fact, I think public consumption of Twitter streams for random enjoyment is probably in the minority. Sure there will be the short tail of Twitter users that post interesting news-like content with a general appeal, but I imagine that that kind of content will key in the 3-5% range.
The wider and longer term use of Twitter will be closer to Pownce, and will be for groupings of people who know each other, more likely offline as well as online. The uber-geeks with 6000 friends are in the uber-minority; I really don’t see this group being the majority of users long-term, but rather the early-adopters who find it more convenient than blogging.
Twitter’s greatest challenge will actually be improving the service while staying compatible with the lowest common denominator (SMS). Pownce was able to dispense with SMS and added a number of new features off the bat, but the lack of SMS also hurts its flexibility.
In any case, I think Twitter is really a long-tail application, predicated on those accounts with 5-10 friends who post for the benefit of their friends who do care about what tea they’re drinking. This was MySpace’s power and Facebook’s as well. The more I talk with folks outside of the bubblesphere, the more I am certain of this basic, yet fundamental, purpose for using Twitter.
not sure if it is legal or not (?) but twitter could find matches between posts (based on words, links, followers, frequency, etc…) and suggest you other twitts that are similar to the twitts you follow… could be great!
just to check ;-)