A few hours ago I was showering. As with all showering sessions, I usually get an idea. Today it was an idea for simple twitter grouping so I grabbed my daughters bath crayon (an idea someone at SXSW gave me) and made a note on the glass.
I’m calling it g_rouping
This very simple idea requires no 3rd-party services and allows anyone to group a bunch of friends together around an interest so that other twitter users can follow them. All you do is create a group prefixed with g_ and give it a meaningful name. E.g. g_cars g_food g_indianfood
I’ve created a twitter group called g_ultramobilepc and all I need to do now is to advertise it via my normal twitter acount as a friend grouping point. If you’re a friend of ultramobile pc’s, you follow the group with your twitter account and folllow the friends of the group to connect with like-minded people. Done.
As ‘owner’ of the group, I will follow you back and weed out the bots and spammers so that the friends list is higher quality than the followers list. You follow friends manually by hitting the friends page or use 3rd party tools that will automatically connect you with all the friends. (I need to test these before I recommend an particular one. Any ideas welcome.)
Obviously there is a lag between the time that bots follow the group and the time the admin removes them so there’s a chance that you’ll end up with a bot or two but i’m sure you can handle it. There’s also no guarantee that a ultra mobile PC friend won’t talk about bacon sandwiches too but again, thats a problem with twitter until it implements some sort of chat tagging, streaming or sub-acounts.
I haven’t found a way to view the tweets that the group sees from its friends but of course, when you follow the friends, you’ll see the tweets anyway.
I’d like to see others create g_ groups and test this out so go ahead. if this takes off, it will be easy for twitter to implement the g_ username as a group with special tools and that’s something we all want to see. Go ahead and create one for your interest area and let me know if you have ideas or thoughts in the comments below.
P.S. I checked the T&C’s and there doesn’t seem to anything that prevents anyone from doing this and personally, I think that using a g_ prefix will allow twitter to enhance services for this groups idea.
P.P.S. You can follow me @chippy too!
