Solo Technology

I’ve been dabbling with Twitter for a few months now; slowly adding (and subtracting) folks to follow and generally enjoying the scene. It’s an interesting balancing act to find truly interesting people to follow, yet not feel like I’m drinking from a fire hose.

In fact, at times it reminds me a lot of the CB radio scene back in the 70’s and 80’s. There’s a lot of good information flowing through here, but you sure have to do a lot of sorting and weeding to get to it! A high signal to noise ratio, so to speak (or is that low? I get ‘em mixed up at times).

To help with finding more people to follow and then figuring out what’s going on, some useful sites have been popping up lately. What follows are just a few that I’ve recently discovered.

Looking for Folks to Follow?

Check out twubble or Twits Like Me. Both can give you some interesting folks to check out and (perhaps) follow.

With Twubble you must provide your twitter credentials. It then looks through the people you’re following and who they’re following and makes suggestions based on (I’m assuming) frequency. It’s pretty slick, but does tend to turn up a fair amount of those “A-Listers” with 4 kabillion followers. However, or in spite of that, I have found some interesting new names this way.

(side note: Keep an eye on Twitterholic if you want to find more A-Listers to follow. It’s a quantified popularity contest.)

Twits Like Me works a bit differently. In fact, I’m not completely sure how it works, but it seem to “analyze” your tweets’ content and find others that mention the same things (?maybe?). At any rate, it can produce another interesting list of folks to check out. A fun one to try.

Trying to Figure Out What Someone is Babbling About?

Some people can be interesting to follow, but also confusing at times. Quotably can, sometimes, help you sort out what’s going on. If there’s some back and forth going in, it helps pull it all together in a threaded style view.

A small example:

Really cool when it works. And sometimes it just poops the bed and derails. I’m not sure why, but it does have a “fix threading” option that I just noticed that is rather cool.

Public Service Messages

Speaking of Quotably, a thought: If you want to reply to someone from the Twitter web site, be sure to use the (relatively new) reply arrow. That’ll “link” your reply to their original tweet. One hopes that helps out Quotably and other threading utilities as well.

A final thought: There are a lot of truly interesting people on Twitter, but so many of them I just can’t manage to follow for long. Why? Because all their tweets are responses or directed at other people (in other words, everything starts with “@somebody“). Their tweets don’t stand alone.

Well gee, now I’m listening in on an IM conversation — and only getting half of it. Oh sure, through the wonders of much mouse clicking I can backtrack to read both sides, but that can get tedious after a while. And honestly, I feel like a voyeur sometimes. Thus I end up un-following those now. I miss some good stuff, but at least I can see what the other people I follow are up to.

Any other cool Twitter related utilities that I’ve missed?

One Response to “Helpful Twitter Related Sites”

1. Paul on April 13th, 2008 6:21 pm
   

   I like your analogy of Twitter of being like the ’70’s CB radio scene. It is kind of like that. Interesting to see what others are doing.

Leave a Reply