Twitter's lists 

Like a bunch of other people I had the new Twitter lists feature turned on today. Immediately I needed a list to explore and had a bunch of ready-made ideas. I had already done aggregated feeds of the top 100 most followed people on Twitter, the employees of the Twitter company and the NY Times, the Twin Cities and most recently Berkeley Twitterers.

The last one I replicated as a Twitter list.

If you don't yet have the feature turned on, you'll get a blank page on the last link. Here's a screen shot of what it looks like.

Basically you get a flow of all the people I've chosen to put on the Berkeley list.

Depending on what the API looks like we'll probably see all kinds of tools for combining and cloning lists.

It's a new authority system. The number of lists you appear on is a kind of page-rank. So let's hope Twitter does two things: 1. Provides an open API to crawl this data set. 2. Doesn't pollute it by artificially inflating the rank of friendly press and their industry friends. Stay out of the editorial space and let a healthy ecosystem develop. It's another chance to not screw it up.

Some people have said it's somehow related to the Suggested User List but I don't see it at all. This feature is for advanced users, the SUL is for total newbies. Unless Twitter somehow data mines our lists, something they could have done right at the start, it won't have any impact on the newbies' user experience.

Update: As you would expect, Scoble is going crrrazy with this feature!

Uncle Arno's books 

My mother's uncle, Arno Schmidt, was a German author who lived between 1914 and 1979. He left a collection of his work to his sister Lucy, my grandmother, and when she died in 1977, the collection was passed to my mother. Legend has it that he gave the collection to his sister because he wanted a backup of his work in the United States.

Time goes by, and now my mother is thinking about passing on her stuff, and we want to do the right thing with Arno's legacy. There's a museum in Germany that wants the books, but they already have copies, and Arno wanted a copy in the US, so we're going to try to get him his wish.

I've listed our collection of books in a separate post.

We're looking for a university in the United States, probably one with a German Studies Department and a library, to take the whole collection. We're not looking to make money from this donation, it's strictly a gift, but we would like to have the materials accessible to the public. Ideally we'd like to work with a university in NY or the Bay Area because that's where our family is.

I wanted to make this offer publicly, through my blog, because it seems consistent with my efforts to get our electronic work archived. Here's a chance to learn how it's done with writing created in the mid-20th century. If you are at a university that is interested, either post a comment here, or send me an email at dave dot winer at gmail dot com. Thanks!