Channels Will Improve the Twitter Experience

Chris Messina has outlined (in a fairly voluminous way) a proposal for the use of hash tags (strings like “#tag”) as a way to help make sense of the noise within Twitter. He enumerates different sorts of “groups” that could be supported in Twitter, and then takes my concept of ‘groupings’ — ad hoc assemblages of people sharing a common interest implied by a tag — and runs with it:

[from Groups for Twitter; or A Proposal for Twitter Tag Channels]

[…]

The type that I’m most interested in, and am prepared to offer a concrete proposal on, is actually of a fourth kind, most closely related to Stowe’s “groupings”, but with a slightly different lean, primarily in the model of how the grouping is established. In the cases presented above, there are very explicit approaches taken, since it’s somewhat taken for granted that groups imply a kind of management. Whether you’re dealing with public groups that you create, join and then promote or contact groups that you ultimately must manage like any kind of mailing list, they imply an order of magnitude of work that would ultimately work against the adoption of the whole grouping premise and thereby minimize any benefits to a select group of hyper-dedicated process-followers.

I’m more interested in simply having a better eavesdropping experience on Twitter.

I support the details of Chris’ spec. My sense is that tags in Twitter, as elsewhere, define shared experience of some kind, involving all those using the tag. And the use can be either actively putting a hash tag (like “#hashtag”) into a tweet, or more passively opting to follow a stream of tweets related to a tagged theme.

This accords exactly with the idea of groupings. I am increasingly uninterested in traditional groups in social apps: where members ‘join’, perhaps following a required invitation, and someone ‘owns’ and ‘manages’ the group. Groups have their place in the work context, but are less relevant in open socializing of individuals. Groupings can be wonderful for serendipity: consider the grouping of all people within Last.fm who have listened to a particular musician recently, or the clutch of people who have tagged a blog post with the term ‘Twitter’.

Just in passing: the failure of Technorati to make something out of the millions of groupings lost within their map of the blogosphere baffles me. I hope that some enterprising entrepreneurs begin to think about the meta-groupings that could be found across these various applications, across these apparently unrelated social media streams. A new angle for MyBlogLog, perhaps?

Tagspaces could be interesting and rich shared experiences, but no one seems to be really exploring that side of their existence. Del.icio.us has trained us to think of tags as metadata for bookmarks, and blogs have trained us to view them as metadata for posts. But tags imply communities, and no one is doing much to let those communities find themselves. Twitter hash tags could help.

[PS I looked, and the domain “www.twittosphere.com” is already taken, damn it.]