Posting to Geographies and Subscribing to Interests on Twitter
Topics and Interests, Geographical Publishing, and Subscriptions
I like Twitter, but not all of it. I like what people post on Twitter, but not all of it.
I’d like to be able to filter out parts of what people talk about. I don’t want to read posts about politics, for instance, or sports, babies and what people ate for lunch.
Other people might love these parts of a person’s life, but don’t want to hear about Apple or technology.
Subscribing to Parts of a Person’s Life
For instance, I often follow UX Designers for their design tweets, and when I do I’m interested only the tweets relevant to UX design. With topics, you would be able to subscribe to different flavors content from a person, or topic.
You can search a specific geography but you can’t publish to it.
You can follow a hashtag but you can’t subscribe to one.
What about using a colon to tag a post by a topic, and allow people to subscribe to that topic in your life?
Geographical Subscriptions
When I first explored the Portland tech community, I only followed people in Portland. It was easy to see news from a specific geography. Now, tweets about Portland are lost in the noise and I can not longer separate them out without having a specific search in Tweetdeck that is dedicated to them.
Relevant Tweets, Eliminating the Noise
In the 2007 when Twitter was prone to fail whaling, software developer Aaron Parecki made a Twitter clone to allow people to communicate when Twitter wasn’t working.
Built into the system were channels where one could subscribe to various parts of a person’s life instead of the entire person.
For him, these channels were like hashtags, but in reverse, because hashtags publish to everyone, but channels publish to a topic segment that someone had expressed an interest in.
Additional Thoughts
This post is an exploration of ideas that Aaron Parecki and I have had for the last four years.
I know that this system has been integrated into some sites, and many networks are trying to implement aspects of this, but I don’t think it’s been done well yet.
What are your thoughts on how this would work? Would you use Twitter more or derive more value from the site if you could filter through tweets and parts of people’s lives in this way?
4 Responses to “Posting to Geographies and Subscribing to Interests on Twitter”
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See you at Open Source Bridge 2012!
You should check out sfter.com
it’s actually how I found this article
For Twitter to be worth more of my time, the signal to noise ratio has to change. I have often wondered where the best place to do this filtering is. Is it in the Twitter client? Is it on a 3rd party service that archives tweets and intelligently curates, tags, or otherwise organizes them?
Or does twitter itself need some rethinking to take us beyond the hash tag? Hash tags are helpful when following an event or trend, especially in real time. But what about the value of content that had already been posted? Making twitter more topical and allowing me to both follow experts and areas of expertise, is to me the holy grail of extracting the value I get from Twitter.
When Google+ first came out, I was really excited about being able to publish to just some of my circles. Over a couple weeks of use I realized that it wasn’t that I wanted a more robust ‘who does this go to’ but rather something more akin to what you are bringing up.
I am very much the same way as you with UX people, as well as developers, people who cook, etc. I am timid about adding more people to my twitter because I already am not getting enough signal to the noise, turning up the volume isn’t going to fix that.
SubJot had an interesting approach – posting to ‘tags’ / ‘categories’. I think they’re still around. I have an account but I haven’t played with it recently.
Geo-subscriptions and “place data” is so complicated because of all the proprietary place databases and licensing restrictions. I’m beginning to think Twitter gave up trying to keep up in location – it’s probably a business decision rather than an engineering one.