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I came across an article Robert Scoble wrote yesterday about the new method he’s going to use to organize his Twitter accounts. He’s been getting really excited lately as he figures out how to efficiently use Twitter to access good information that’s important to him. I’m going to write about the importance of media scanning as part of a “metathinking” framework in an upcoming post, so I’ll leave the commentary about what he figured out about Twitter lists for later.
Basically, Scoble decided to create multiple Twitter accounts to organize the different types of information he produces:
The value to this is much deeper than it may appear at first. Twitter is an amazing experimental grounds in figuring out how to leverage the power of the real-time web. Besides being an incredible platform that essentially operates as an “idea exchange”, where we can chew on ideas and news together collectively, it’s an amazing source of information acquisition.
As Scoble figured out in organizing his Lists, by creating different lenses and filters in Twitter, we can control the types of information we want to access. By separating his information into different accounts, he’s giving his readers the opportunity to also get filtered information.
It makes total sense, because not everything @scobleizer says is going to bring you value. If you’re not a personal contact of his, then you’d probably be satisfied with just seeing the original content he produces. Everything else is basically just noise. For instance, I just pulled this one out of his feed:
Obviously, unless you’re that person or know the context of the conversation, that comment means absolutely nothing to you.
Another example that comes to mind is Beth Kanter’s feed. If you’re a nonprofit who cares anything about how to use social media for social change, you should probably be reading her blog. I keep wanting to add @kanter to my “social change strategy” List, but she has so many individual exchanges with people that I have a hard time extracting the value from her stream. For instance, here’s a screenshot of her feed from just now:
There’s just a lot of excess noise that I don’t have the time to deal with. From a business perspective, that could mean the potential loss of a client for her, because they’re not able to filter the stream and see how valuable her knowledge would be for their organization.
So, why create a separate Twitter account?
* It will allow your audience to hone in on the content you create that matters most to them.
* It improves your information search strategies, because you can create Lists that only include original content.
It’s a great way for organizing a better system of thinking.
I hope that every serious blogger follows this lead and creates a separate Twitter account that just pulls the RSS from their blog into Twitter. (use Twitterfeed for this). We’ll all get more value from the network.
emergent by design 
Very interesting! Thanks. It’s funny, I do one-on-one conversations not because they’re clients but because I come across something that may be of interest to someone else in my network – mostly all on the topics of nonprofits and social media – usually has links.
That’s a good idea about setting up a blog stream – I could send my blog RSS and bookmarking RSS.
Beth
Also, there’s an awful lot you can do on your own to filter people’s streams if it is too much for you. Take for example:
http://www.alevin.com/?p=1871
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Thanks Beth.
As I’m reading the post that was linked to in that article by Amy Gahran, it just made me think some different. In it she talks about ‘relevant discovery’ as being one of the bonus features of lists. If we overfilter our lists though, aren’t we cutting out some potential for relevant discovery and emergent results?
They say that creativity and innovation are often inspired by information that’s OUTSIDE of our interest areas, so maybe it IS good to group by lists, but not overfilter all the time.
It surely is a great idea for his followers coz they have exactly the choice of information you mention. Actually I had the same thing with guykawasaki and his @alltop-account today.
On the other hand, for me personally the @-/conversation-noise isn’t so much of an issue, since my Desktop-Twitter-Client doesn’t show me those Tweets when they begin with “@username”. That’s kind of a natural filter. Still think for a business-purpose, giving his readers a choice is a good idea.
That’s a good point. I am still new-ish to Twitter and figuring out the best ways to filter content.
Another reason it might be nice to have separate accounts for some users is a matter of how they tweet – I noticed that some people have blogs with content I LOVE, but their tweets aren’t necessarily focused on the same thing as their blog – meaning they tweet more about random things or use Twitter as a conversation platform, which is totally fine, but it would be nice to have the option to just get their ‘juicy’ content if they’re not going to be tweeting about what they write about.
Oh, and another thing to mention – with a user like Scoble, he favorites a bunch of great content, which is essentially his bookmarks, so I could follow just his original content, and check in with his favorites whenever I wanted to.
It would be interesting if Twitter would let us tag our favorites list, so it would essentially become a social bookmarking platform too.
Yes, I agree with that and made the same experiences. Actually in some few cases I switched from originally following someone on twitter to “just” read the RSS of his blog. Which I never would have found without twitter though.
Very interesting!
I’ve been doing this for a while but it has waned off as the blackberry does not easily handle multiple Twitter accounts without having to have loads of Twitter clients.
This does feel like a “sledgehammer” solution though – perhaps Twitter need allow us to create lists for outbound tweets? That way people can follow only the topics/channels which are of interest to them
Sorry if there are typos – commenting via Blackberry is a nightmare!
Joel
Joel,
Thanks for your thoughts. Filtering is a sticky situation, because as I mentioned to Beth above, it’s said that creativity and innovation often come about as a result of information that is outside your interest area/unknown to you, so by filtering out the “noise”, are we filtering out the opportunity to learn something new or have a powerful idea?
I’ll have to keep thinking on this…….
I completely agree that separate twitter accounts are necessary for certain parts of your life. As my twitter accounts (@philmichaelson, @kartme) both started to move professional, I realized that my personal life stream (e.g., Restaurants in NYC I like, Books I want to read), was no longer relevant to most of my followers.
I built KartMe.com to organize the links, products and places that I consider important enough to organize for later. Because I’m willing to organize them for myself in lists, people can choose to follow just my Movie list or just my Wine list.
So, my recommendation: have multiple twitter accounts for various promotional efforts, and then have a KartMe account for organizing and sharing favorites to eat, buy, see or read.
cool service. i like the ‘recipe box’ feature – i can never seem to find a good way to keep track of recipes i find.
This is certainly an interesting post, but I don’t think that it’s Scoble that pioneered it. I in fact wrote a blog post over 3 months ago about multiple user accounts, largely inspired by Dom Sagolla, one of Twitter’s founders and the author of the newly released 140 Characters: A Style Guide to the Short Form. Dom’s book sparked a lot of thought for me in my use of Twitter, with multiple accounts being the most immediately obvious impact.
If you’re interested in reading my take on multiple accounts, and how Dom helped inspire it, you can check out my post http://bit.ly/3h8qy2
Mark,
You’re right, perhaps the title was a bit sensationalist…. I haven’t been on Twitter that long, so a lot of recycled ideas seem new to me. I’ll be careful about that in the future.
I liked your post, and I’m curious about the results. You said in the post that you were going to shuffle your follows and followers….. has it helped you get better/more relevant information?
Absolutely. I know what I’m looking for when I log in, and I get it. Same to my followers. They know if they want the teacher-side of me, go to that account. Personal goofy me, that account, and so on and so forth. I highly recommend it!
I’ve been hoping for a feature that could enable Twitterers to define various “channels,” so prospective followers would have the ability to subscribe to —
– all Tweets
– personal updates
– funny/quirky stuff
– subject A
– subject B
– subject C
– etc
This would enable people to avoid a huge share of unsought Tweeting, and enable “connectors” to do a lot more in filtering/aggregating content from a wide range of Twitterers.
Are there any good ways for suggesting features like this to Twitter?
Best,
Mark Frazier
@openworld
Just catching up with your blog so this may be old news now.
Just like email abuse, what are ya gonna do. It’s up to the receiver to filter in the end, as not everyone is going to follow your good practice that you share with us in this post.
I use @filttr
It allows me to create lists based on people, search terms, or both.
Further to this I can even limit the stream to link only tweets.
Read more on my experience
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2009/07/06/filter-twitter-with-filttr/