Twitter has a problem.
I have many different social groups that I interact with. For reading messages from these groups – I have created lists. They work fairly well on the reading side to see what a certain group of people are tweeting about.
But what about sending messages?
I send out messages on many different topics. Maybe it is the eclectic in me showing. I might tweet about a local traffic problem, and in the next moment about the latest research on geolocation privacy. My shared links to do with the law (I work in the legal profession) may have no interest to many in my group, but will be spot on for other members.
So what is the solution? Right now we are presented with only 2 options:
– Create different twitter user for each ‘topic’ we want to post tweets on, or
– Use external services for sending out such information.
Facebook status updates are actually an excellent example of this. When Facebook lists/groups were first introduced, I diligently added each friend to a specific group: real life friends, high school classmates, social media friends, work (bar association) friends, etc.
They have proved to be essential to my Facebook experience. I am selective to whom I send out status updates to. They work in read/write manner, both restricting your posts going out (for privacy) and also to read messages from these groups.
I believe Twitter needs some sort of outgoing list or tagging system. When someone follows you, you should be able to ‘tag’ them as interested in a topic. Perhaps this tag can be shared so that they can modify their interest in you – because although you may primarily be interested in one topic, if a person is interesting enough all of their messages may be of interest.
The problem here then is that you are adding a level of complexity to sending a “Tweet” which is part of the brilliance of Twitter. Instead of having to compose a long message, tag a topic or think of a headline you simply tweet your message, 140 characters or less.
What solution do you currently use to fix this problem?
