Twitter Lists

For the last two days, I have been organizing Tweets I follow into Twitter Lists. I follow US Government Tweets here to understand what do my fellow IT Geek/bureaucrats tweet about. It's been an interesting exercise. Most of it is plain noise which doesn't really make sense in the grand scheme of things. Twitter can be used as an enabling tool for agency branding strategies. Here are some of the tweets I saw:

• RT @FEMA Extreme winter weather tonight/tomorrow? Listen to local officials, prepare at www.ready.gov, & track at www.weather.gov - DHSJournal
  
• Governors declare state of emergency in VA, Maryland and Mass. in advance of approaching storm http://on.cnn.com/evCvN1 /via @cnnbrk - fema
• Want to Resolve Your ADA Complaint? Consider Mediation http://bit.ly/gWuVLV- Disabilitygov
• National Security Agency: Program Manager ( #FortGeorgeG.Meade , MD) http://bit.ly/cMXhyJ #ProjectMgmt #Jobs #Job #TweetMyJOBS - NSACareers
• Happy holidays to you and yours! - EPAgov (tweeted on Dec 25th, 2010)

Anyway as you can see, Twitter is giving me the power to group the tweets I follow into "lists". This is a great idea. Rather than Tweeter creating the lists for me, it lets me create the lists and lets me publish my lists to the Twitter world.

Why is this so great? Twitter is allowing its users to create user centric communities of interest. This is truly social. Usually organizations, standards' bodies or architectures define the communities of interest which to some degree fail because it doesn't appeal to everyone. I have seen this problem in the "search" world. Search engine technologies like Autonomy let organizations or data architects design the taxonomy for a specific topic and then the search engine moves the documents to the appropriate taxonomy node during indexing. If the taxonomy is not done right then bunch of documents don't get put in the taxonomy and they are grouped in the "other" node. The reason why folksonomies work better than taxonomies is because of the "social" aspect. Folks who know the content are organizing it and not some information architect who is following an archaic process. BTW why do relational data architects call themselves data architects. Most of them don't have a clue on how to build an ontology.

Anyway I see alot of potential with the social function. If anyone has an opinion regarding this matter then please chime in. You can also follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/eknock