Scripting News: Reading lists for Twitter?

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Reading lists for Twitter?

I'd like to be able to subscribe to bundles of users.

Use-case #1. Suppose I'm going to a conference, like Gnomedex last week. For the duration of the conference I'd like to be subscribed to every person at the conference. This would form the complete back-channel. I would hear what everyone was saying during the conference. But maybe that would be too much when I got home, if so, I could just wholesale unsub from the lot.

Use-case #2. Say I'd like to see what it's like to be someone famous for a day or two. So I would say "Subscribe me to all of Steve Jobs's friends." Then I'd see what Larry Ellison, Al Gore and Bill Campbell were doing. Then when I wanted to see the world through someone else's eyes, I'd unsub from Steve's friends and sub to all their friends.

Use-case #3. Think of "mutual funds" of people, reading lists managed by experts. So I could subscribe to a list of Macintosh experts as we're approaching an Apple product announcement. Or people in Peru after the earthquake there. Or a U.S. news list that would automatically recalc according to the judgement of an expert when the news shifted from topic to topic. As we approach the New Hampshire primary, news of that state would be heavily represented. After that's over, we'd move to news of South Carolina.

Obviously this feature would work for any news-oriented social network. Originally I proposed it for RSS, they were called "reading lists," but I couldn't get the community of reader developers to implement the feature. I did implement reading lists for the NewsRiver aggregator that's built into the OPML Editor. Maybe the time is right, in the developing social networks, which are very much like the world of RSS.

I'd like to experiment with this. I wonder if it's possible to add it using the Twitter API. I'll have to think about it.

Any thoughts are welcome. Post a comment here.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:01:26 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Jul Sep