Create mobile Irish Channels on Twitter
26th of September 2007 by conor
One of the biggest drawbacks of Twitter compared to Jaiku for micro-blogging is the inability to do decent filtering. In Jaiku you can create channels around topics of interest e.g. #podcamp, #irishopencoffee.
Recently Chris Messina started doing his own version of channels or tags on Twitter by simply marking words in his Tweets with a # symbol. I think the idea was to create a groundswell of support so that it would get baked into the product just like the @ convention. Stowe Boyd became an (almost unreadable) early adopter.
Today Twitter effectively launched support for this without mentioning it and for IM and Mobile only. In fact what they launched was the ability to track any tweets anywhere which mention a particular string e.g. NYC. As an example I can't think of anything worse, as you could be overwhelmed with incomings. However, if you do it for these pseudo-channels like #Cork or #BarCampGalway or heck #IrishDogRacing then you have something very powerful and useful.
The spam issue will have to be addressed when it becomes a problem. I hope they extend this to the web-site too as it could genuinely be a big step forward in functionality. Of course, being a Twitter feature, I haven't actually got the notifications to work yet!
Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 10/5/2007 12:26:49 PM
Thanks!
Twitter has a UK number but not an Irish one. Therefore some UK mobile users can send for nothing if they have free texts. In Ireland we pay cost of international text. On my Voda account that is 21c but I believe on Meteor it is approx 16c.
Jaiku only has a Finnish number and that is 21c from Ireland for me too.
Comment posted by cpokane
at 10/5/2007 11:52:38 AM
I know this might sound ridiculous, but I really haven't seen the potential of twitter until recently. The marketing potential is huge.
One question: how much do mobile operators charge you to send texts through twitter? Is it the price of standard Irish texts or do the mobile operators charge you for texting a UK number? I know it might sound like a ridiculous question, but any info would be greatly appreciated.
It's a great blog incidentally.
Comment posted by A Frog in the Valley Twitter supports #tags
at 9/27/2007 4:18:53 PM
[] blognation Ireland Blog Archive Create mobile Irish Channels on Twitter: Recently Chris Messina started doing his own version of channels or tags on Twitter by simply marking words in his Tweets with a # symbol. I think the idea was to create a groundswell of support so that it would get baked into the product just like the @ convention. Stowe Boyd became an (almost unreadable) early adopter () Today Twitter effectively launched support for this without mentioning it and for IM and Mobile only. In fact what they launched was the ability to track any tweets anywhere which mention a particular string e.g. NYC. This entry was written by Sylvain and posted on 2007/09/27 at 04:16 and filed under blogs, social networks, asides, publishing, lang=en. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. « Montreal's own Tungle impresses the Demo 2007 Crowd []
Comment posted by James Corbett
at 9/27/2007 11:51:38 AM
I was only joking about the pup by the way, I don't own one myself. I've also subscribed to a few tags and only one (maxroam) has yet brought any results. I find it hard to believe the other (common words) haven't been tweeted yet. Hmmm.
Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 9/27/2007 11:20:29 AM
I was going for niche with that one.
Unfortunately, as with so many things associated with Twitter, this is just not working for me. I added tracking for about six different terms on one account and sent Tweets with another account containing those terms. None of them were detected.
Yet when I set a tracker on the term #Podcamp, it found someone who tweeted with the word Podcamp (sans #). It looks like instead of supporting the # convention they are actively not supporting it. Very disappointing.
Comment posted by James Corbett
at 9/27/2007 11:02:49 AM
Didn't know you were a fan of dog racing Conor! Interested in a very promising puppy? 
Comment posted by James Gallagher
at 9/27/2007 5:54:27 AM
I've become quite a fan of Jaiku over Twitter recently. I've been using Jaiku a lot more recently popping comments in here and there (hadn't used comments until recently) mainly to get some contact going with people I figured I'll encounter if I make it along to a BarCamp or Open Coffee event. Channels are neat, I enjoyed the way #barcampireland was used.