Saurabh Garg on The New New Thing

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Yes, I am a twitter fanboy. I love telling the world what I am doing on twitter and it in turn helps me connect with interesting people - people who I would have never met through my blog or participation in online forums.

And for most of the people on the Internet, twitter is one of those things that they love to hate. Everyone has an opinion and everyone cribs about the downtimes, limited features, too much noise etc., but fact of the matter remains that its a very useful utility and wonderful things can come out of it.

I use twitter for generating ideas (for work, blog etc.), small market researches, finding people for collaborative projects (twitterBook, Freedom Blog, Travel) and most importantly, to kill time. And since its like entire world talking at the same time, I follow people from really wide backgrounds. And people from even more diverse backgrounds and profiles follow me. Lot of times what I talk is pertinent to only a select group of people.

Today while talking about bikes on twitter, I realized if I could create mailing lists to update only the followers interested in biking, it will save my other followers from these rants on bikes. Similarly I talk to a lot of people on trends in social media. If I could only speak to certain people at one time, my other followers not interested in social media can save the trouble of ignoring my social media ideas. If I could create distribution lists, it will help me communicate better and keep conversations in context.

The ides of lists can be extended to public mailing lists too. Currently, I can keep track of conversations on a specific keyword by using the track command on twitter. And since its like catching words off the conversation, I don’t really find it effective. What if there were public mailing lists that I can subscribe to? Think of Yahoo Groups and Google Groups and Usenets implemented on Twitter. An example could be a mailing list titled IndiaTravels and every subscriber to this mailing list can send/receive updates related to travel. Obviously, this would be a free to join (opt-in and opt-out) list with some bits of moderation.

To sum it up,

• IDEA: Create distribution lists - both public and user-defined.
• How would it help: Helps me targets messages, keeps conversations in context and most importantly chaffs noise and signal.

What do you guys think? Can we somehow use the twitter APIs to create lists? Any thoughts?

UPDATE: Friendfeed already allows you to create “rooms” where people with similar interests can come together and share things.

Credits: Twitter Logo via ShadowKris on Flickr