We’ve been joined on teh Internets by a new service, TweetNI, by the incredibly prolific Lee Munroe.
If you don’t know Lee, make an effort to make his acquaintance. He’s smart, savvy and has a great eye for design. He’s previously partly responsible for The Big Word Project, Lookaly and probably other things I’m not even aware of. TweetNI represents his latest foundling.
To join TweetNI you just need to tweet something with the tag #tweetni. This joins other redundant tags which localise content and services and there seems to be no limit to how many tags there are. Essentially it’s a list on the Internet.
Here’s my problem with it.
What’s the next step?
You get a heap of people on a list. The people who rise to the top are already the popular people so they’re going to gain followers. If you’ll notice, these folk also don’t follow many people (but they do retweet a lot of web site links).
What could the site be used for? How about an authoratative skills matrix and extend/replace the Bio? How about building an event scheduling service – where anyone who joins can post something and have decent feeds coming out of it? How about a Trust engine? An opt-in personal recommendation engine? How about a list of Twitterers who would be interested in car-pooling? Or listing folk by region who would be interested in beer-garden tweetups on a Sunday?
All I’m saying is that a list by itself is spam. A list which can introduce some social change or commentary, some potential collaboration or just even an opportunity to extend a hand in friendship to someone.
hows about making it a place to co-ordinate joint projects – or a place to post a request for help.
one thing to do would be for tweetni to offer the ability for a person with a particular skill set to tweet tweetni – with their skill set, adding that data to the list.
that way when a member of the list tweets help – “[skill] required #tweetni” then everyone on that list with that skill gets a tweet from the tweetni account.
_shouldn’t_ be too difficult to do if i had the time!
I agree that it would be great to see the site extended, more functionality added …
That said, a list in itself can be a great start. As a relative newbie to the NI digital scene, even a quick glance helped me find people in NI that I haven’t had the chance to meet yet. I’ve checked out their profiles, followed a few and come across some interesting blog posts – particularly from people a little further down the list who aren’t already high profile.
Personally, I look at it more like a geographic blogroll – in the same way that the list in your sidebar points me to interesting sites and people I’ve yet to check out.
I agree wholeheartedly that extending the site beyond a simple list is certainly a great idea – and the possibilities are exciting – but anything that makes it easier for the NI biz/tech/media community to connect has to be a good start.
Good ideas – keen to hear more. Maybe Lee et all will consider them 🙂
Some good ideas there Matt, and likewise Alex and Mark.
To give you a bit of a background on TweetNI, it was really a ‘2-day’ project to experiment using the Twitter API. Rather than just creating a meaningless test project I figured a list of NI Twitter users (that could be filtered and searched) would be quite useful so I set down that route.
For me I’ve already found it quite useful. Scanning down the list I’ve found quite a few interesting people that I didn’t know. Am even finding people who are from here originally but are now located elsewhere which is pretty cool.
I’m happy to listen to any ideas and if anyone would like to sit down for a chat and even have a go at improving it feel free to get in touch. Am always open to ideas 🙂