I am calling for a group subscription framework to be developed so that with “one click” you could create a group of Twitter users in TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop or whichever Twitter client you use.
This framework would allow companies to create a group of their employees and post the group subscription link on their homepage – just like an RSS feed. It would also give an individual user the ability to create their own ad hoc groups based on any criteria they chose. The creator of the group would maintain the master list and any changes they made to the group would be dynamically updated in the clients of those who subscribed. If this was available, creating the group in your Twitter client and following specific groups of users would be as simple as subscribing to an RSS feed.
Following specific groups of people, especially entire companies, can actually be quite a useful thing to do. ReadWriteWeb did a recent study of all Twitter employees’ Twitter accounts and was able to come up with some pretty interesting tidbits of information. I personally found the value of following an entire company on Twitter when I started following the team at Squarespace (the blog and website creation tool I use for my personal website). I started following a couple employees of the company and was constantly getting great tips that weren’t showing up on the Squarespace company blog. As a result I went through the manual process of hunting down the Twitter handles of all the Squarespace employees I could find and then added them to a group in Seesmic Desktop.
So if developers of Twitter clients are listening, please help! Until such a group subscription framework is developed you will have to do it manually. Below is a list of The Next Web Team and our Twitter handles:
Zee Kane – @zee
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten – @Boris
Ralf Rottmann – @24z
Martin Bryant – @martinsfp
Keith Tsudo – @tsudo
Joop Dorresteijn – @joop
Mike Bracco – @bracco
I already have such a framework, although it is working on a website as a proxy for Twitter with a Twitter style API deliberately to allow clients to connect to it.
There are extensions to the API for just this type of thing and to allow groups to be shared should the owner and delegated managers so wish…..
My e-mail is jesse@socialtoo.com if anyone is interested…
SocialToo gives each user a whitelist to ensure no one gets unfollowed who is on that list. I consider it my list of “favorites”. We also provide an API for developers if they want access to that whitelist on behalf of a user. We’ve got the framework you’re looking for – have any developers looking to integrate contact me.
(btw, we also offer access to blacklist and mark users as auto-dmers via this same API)
you know most of us that run sites where grouping users(crowdstatus was the first to group twitter user I might add :p) are likely to be working on the same thing.
I have one in the works for the new version of crowdstatus, I don’t want to go into details but its going to be a big feature of the new site.
I am just using opml for my format.
http://www.getafreelancer.com/ is a website of Freelance Programmer, Web Designer, Copywriter or Translator. That might be a good place to start!