Twitter is a mess once you start mass-following. Some people will doubt mass-following is useful and will advise you to concentrate on the persons really important to you. But that is not what twitter is all about. I'ld even say that if you want a service like that you should focus on something like Facebook instead. Simply because Twitter is not really good at it.
What Twitter is really good at is to reflect the current opinion and voice of the world regarding a topic. If you are into that, mass-following suddenly makes sense.
The usage pattern for successful mass-following is easy: Know your topics and for each single one of them find at least a dozen persons that tweet about it in an interesting way.
Of course there will be some persons among the ones you follow that you really want to stay connected to. That's where the wish for Twitter Groups comes from.
The Twitter Group Idea is that you group the persons you're following into sets and later use these sets to filter your twitter news stream.
But is that really what you want?
- First of all i'ld have a problem to build the groups.
- Second, the persons on your list tweet with different frequencies and won't get equal shares.
- Third, Twitter does not support groups, so you can only emulate something like that inside an application by
a) reading the complete stream and filter it -or-
b) pulling the updates from the members inside the group one by one and merge them.
No matter if you choose a) or b): The Twitter API will get in the way, as the number of requests you are allowed to send in a given period of time is strictly limited.
I pondered all that during the last days and found out that what i really want is to check some accounts important to me one by one. That's much easier than a full-fledged group feature. It's properly supported by twitter, as each single stream has unlimited history for tweets and thus API limits don't get in the way immediately.
But how do i know which accounts to check? A Twitter-Addressbook is needed that allows for groups. Inside a browser that is easy to achieve with bookmarks and folders:
Inside a client like Tweetie it could be an easy-to-do add-on that doesn't cause twitter-traffic.
I guess a client that properly implements this method would really have the edge over all the others. Because we do not really want to see the activity of a group as a whole. We just don't want to forget to check the updates of ALL members of a given group. And one by one is fine with us.
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