Twitter lists gathered on a wiki blog or forum
As the use of twitter continues to spread despite the restricted service and downtime, a commonplace event for communities is to start compiling lists of links to each other’s twitter accounts. These are handy for anybody who hasn’t already built up their network because you can quickly add a bunch of people who are all involved in the same interest or practice. Acting as a kind of jump start into twitter for groups, it feels like a community indicator of some sort.
If the community is based mainly on a web forum or email list then it can start with a message from one member who is a twitter enthusiast, that turns into a long thread with the same message re-quoted and a new line added at the bottom. That’s not ideal, but it works for a while and builds up a volume of attention to the activity.
Over on one bloggers’ forum we tried compiling the list of member’s twitter links and putting it into a new service called “dropio” where anybody could upload new files and links, but that service proved problematic.
When the same process broke out at E-mint, a community for online facilitators, ‘community managers’ and moderators it wasn’t long before somebody – Ed Mitchell – said “Definitely a wiki job, this one” and so here we have the ….
E-mint twitter list on DARwiki
The advantage of having the twitter list on a wiki is that you can link to what will be always the latest version and that members can easily add themselves or make corrections.
If it’s a person-centric or blog-centric community such as Darren Rowse’s pro-blogger readers, the twitter list is gathered from the comments left on an invitation post and then published on the blog.
If the community is forming in a friendfeed room then there’s probably no need to compile a twitter list at all because the aggregator sort of does that automatically in that each member’s tweets are in their own streams and twitter links in their services page – which stands in as a profile page on friendfeed.
What other formats and processes have you seen out there for gathering twitter lists?
