Twitter as curated news feed
When I follow another Twitter user, their posts (Tweets) are included on my homepage, which is public. This amounts to creating a kind of "newspaper" news feed of content "curated" (selected and managed by me). The problem with this, is for example, that with our farmfoody.org Twitter account (established primarily for communicating announcements to users) is that it could become a kind of "mashup" of farm-food related news by following Twitter users posting on those subjects. However, that would result in clutter and chaos, since there is no way to organize the flow of content onto my homepage.
What is needed, is a way to tag posts. It would be nice if posts could be tagged according to topic and each tag converted to a tab, which would separate the streams of information, so there could be a #farm and a #food tag (using the hashtags convention) and a Farm and Food tab would appear on my homepage, allowing readers to chose the topic they are interested in following. I suppose they could just follow the individual sources, but what is needed is a curated aggregation to enable Twitter users to follow an "edited" flow of information through Twitter (like Reader's Digest?, it might even be possible for Twitter users to give a thumbs up/dn vote on what content should appear in a particular flow or to collaboratively tag).
If I could categorize posts based on farm or food topics, it would be useful to me and my followers. If the users I am following could tag their posts, it would be very similar and I would be relieved of some work (of course, merely following does in a sense create the mix, but it is all jumbled together). It is not important who organizes the content as much as it gets organized with the least effort possible.
I don't know if anyone is working on something like this, but it seems rational that Twitter would be working on some internal mechanisms for organizing that flow. The hashtags solution appears to not be scalable, since it requires following their user account (in order to scan for tags), more of a prototype.
What is needed, is a way to tag posts. It would be nice if posts could be tagged according to topic and each tag converted to a tab, which would separate the streams of information, so there could be a #farm and a #food tag (using the hashtags convention) and a Farm and Food tab would appear on my homepage, allowing readers to chose the topic they are interested in following. I suppose they could just follow the individual sources, but what is needed is a curated aggregation to enable Twitter users to follow an "edited" flow of information through Twitter (like Reader's Digest?, it might even be possible for Twitter users to give a thumbs up/dn vote on what content should appear in a particular flow or to collaboratively tag).
If I could categorize posts based on farm or food topics, it would be useful to me and my followers. If the users I am following could tag their posts, it would be very similar and I would be relieved of some work (of course, merely following does in a sense create the mix, but it is all jumbled together). It is not important who organizes the content as much as it gets organized with the least effort possible.
I don't know if anyone is working on something like this, but it seems rational that Twitter would be working on some internal mechanisms for organizing that flow. The hashtags solution appears to not be scalable, since it requires following their user account (in order to scan for tags), more of a prototype.
Labels: s, social media, social networking, web development
posted by Steve Knoblock at
5:31 PM
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