captsolo weblog

Grouping of related information is a nice thing to have. Twitter is a wildly popular microblogging service yet it lacks ability to group your contacts.

Grouping becomes especially important when you:

• follow 100+ people
• follow people from different communities (e.g., speaking different languages)

In case if you follow many people on Twitter you probably can not read all their tweets (unless reading tweets is your daytime job). Yet you may want to follow all the messages from a smaller community.

It would be cool if you could add people to groups and then filter messages to show only tweets from people in the group. You could switch between information from different groups or display a number of groups side-by-side.

Some applications (e.g. TweetDeck) have added group functionality. But it is then limited to just that application. It would be better if you could exchange group information between users and between applications.

Some groups might be private to a user (e.g., friends or family) while other - topic-oriented groups (e.g., web designers) - could be public. For the latter you may want to exchange information about the group with others or publish it on the web.

Once able to push group info to the web and get it back, people can start to “fork” group lists published by others and modify them by adding their favorites. Or maintain centralized group lists in a wiki-like manner.

Then someone could just load a group definition and be able to get an overview of what people in the community are talking about. We can’t complain about a lack of information these days, but filtering of this information is still a problem. Filtering out a smaller group of tweets might help.

For this to work we need a way to describe a group or a community.

… please leave your comments. this topic will be continued in a followup post … – @CaptSolo