For a good few months, I’ve been thinking about this idea of search and twitter. I believe twitter to be the most up-to-date information today on the web, a story breaks and it spreads like a wildfire across the ‘twitter world’ instantaneously. The problem is that the story/ information is inaccessible to the majority of the twitter users. For example, if I don’t have you as a friend with the story, how will I ever know. Things such as search.twitter.com fail, because how do I search for a story that I never knew existed in the first place? I could be lucky and stumble on what I wanted to know (maybe from the Public Timeline?), but as a user I’m now cut off from the full discussion. I could possibility send a few messages to people discussing the story, but I’m still cut off from the main discussion, unless your within that group of people, you are going to miss out.      

Obviously this is not an issue for the big twitter users who have got thousands of followers like Dave, Cali or Jason. For the average users (I wouldn’t even say I’m one of those), who follows 50 people, whom all live in a very similar geographic location, information will be hard to pass. Their information can only be passed on successfully if they have many friend connections (like a friend of a friend and so on). Again this rely’s upon that information to be passed, will it get through? Will they be interested? – It is really hard to say!   

This morning I awoke to the news that Russell Beattie has launched ‘Roomatic’ (via), which groups twitter users together by topics they are wishing to talk about. It overcomes part of the problem by getting ‘unknown friends’ (people who don’t know each, but have the same interests) together, in a single place, talking about what they want to talk about. Which I believe is a great idea in harvesting the power of twitter. Although as an individual, how did I know I wanted to discuss that topic, until it was right under my nose?

This issue relates back to was I was originally saying, I believe Russ to have a good baseline here, he is getting unknown people together to a common interest or discussion (Something twitter currently can not do on its own). I believe he now needs to focus on getting people to discuss a topic they didn’t realise they wanted to discuss. Encouraging more ‘rooms’ to form, but developing a way of getting people to enter these discussions. He makes a good start in outlining a few popular topics, but more could be done. I still haven’t worked out a solution, it is difficult, but it is on my mind.

How did I know I wanted to discuss the latest topic, when your out of the twitter loop.

- Kyle