I ran across this “Tweet” from Paul Kedrosky the other day: “I’d like to be able (sic) to change channels some days on twitter (sic). Today more earth science and math, tomorrow more economics. Why can’t I do that?”
He should be able to, but Twitter and third-party application developers are not thinking like Paul and other Twitter users.
About two years ago I was teaching a class on interactive design at UTD. The students were tasked with researching and designing new interfaces for products or services that interested them. Some chose physical objects — the credit card terminals at cash registers — while others chose services like Twitter.
Remember, at the time, Twitter was relatively new and had not yet been adopted by the “masses.”
Jacob Naasz, Kenneth Landefeld, and Errol Veloso developed a concept based on the idea of “channels.” One concept was special interest channels (see slide 03 below), while another was modeled after television channels (slide 02). Their thinking was that Twitter users — again, mostly newbies — were more familiar with the channel metaphor than separate Twitter search engines and using # hash tags.
Another student, Jackie Keiser, followed similar logic in developing her special-interest Twitter client, TwitterMatter (slide 01). She envisioned an artist looking for Tweets regarding art, or a “foodie” wanting to follow the exploits of other food enthusiasts, and having her Twitter client doing the searching, aggregating, and organizing for her. There was no need to know Twitter’s geeky nomenclature.
In the past six months to a year, we’re finally starting to see this type of thinking. One of the most interesting recent examples is Flipboard, which takes the Tweets and links of people you follow on Twitter (and Facebook) and aggregates them into a “social media magazine.” Like design? Follow Flip Design. Like sports? Read Flip sports.
Like science and economics? Tune into their Twitter channels.
Don’t feel like using # hash tags and setting up filters to find the information you’re interested in? Let TwitterMatter do the work for you.
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