Barklund.org

The very first idea for my 365 social ideas is Twitter-based. The idea actually originated some time ago, when I started using TweetDeck. The idea was to create an online service for creating and maintaining friend lists (unfortunately TweetDeck can neither import nor export lists in an open way AFAIK, but if). The idea has since expanded to the built-in Twitter Lists, which do have a public API which actually made this original idea further interesting.

The main idea is to create lists of your follows based on three criteria: Geography, Follow-Cycles, and/or Keywords. By follows, I mean the list of people the you follow – by some called friends, but that might not be fitting.

Geography filtering

The first item is quite easy to understand: display all you follows on a map and allow the user to select a region, which could be continent, country, city or how specific the user wishes to be.

Follow-Cycles

Another way of organizing your follows is based on closed (or almost-closed) cycles of follows. For instance, it is very likely that all you colleagues follow each other. The cycle might not be complete, but it might be close. And it might also include false positive, if e.g. you and all your colleagues all follow your favorite politician and this politician is an auto-re-follower – in this case (s)he looks like a part of the cycle but is not. But this will most likely be fixed by fiddling with the other criteria.

To kick-start this criteria, the user would most likely have to select one or two users, and then the system would find follow-cycles involving you and the selected follows.

Keywords

Keyword-selection could be done via tag-clouds based on your follows’ bio as well as latest, say 100 tweets. A hard-hitter would probably be “cool”, “blogged” or “social” in most such tag-clouds.

An example

Let’s take my Twitter-profile, @barklund as a starting point. First, we add the Geography-criterion “Denmark”, then as a Follow-Cycle criterion we add @tveskov as a starting point. I haven’t manually created the full cycle, but for starters, I know that at least @laurajul, @elnif and several others will form one of several closed cycles. And we could furthermore create an even more narrow list by from the resulting tag-cloud (based only on the biographies and latest 100 tweets from the users in the selected cycle in the selected geographic region) selecting the keyword #twulefrokost (which will be a common word within this crowd within the last 2 months).

Why?

Following many people on Twitter makes it difficult to follow conversation. Different tools try to solve this in different ways. Using lists (either on Twitter directly or through one of the many popular clients) is one way, and one that I have used extensively but only by creating them manually. Having tool as described above would really ease the pain and make lists a lot more useful (as the tool would of course try to maintain these lists according to your criteria by adding any existing or new follows, that fit the selection.

What’s next?

Do with this idea whatever you like – expand, implement, trash or forget. Just remember, that if you use it in anyway make sure to attribute me according to the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, that all these 365 Social Ideas are published under.

Related posts:

1. A Twitter Gaming Mechanic – January 2010 Ideas
2. Twadio – January 2010 Ideas
3. Twikicatalyzer – January 2010 Ideas