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Loosely-coupled 140-char reading lists

Saturday, July 25, 2009 by Dave Winer.

I believe we will get beyond Twitter's very simplistic and limited Suggested User List, which I have written about so many times. 

What sealed it for me was reading Glenn Greenwald's piece in Salon about Cheney's plan to use US troops inside the US. 

Here was my thought process: 

1. I'm going to pass this link on to my readers. 

2. A very small number compared to the overall size of the Twitter base. 

3. There are probably a few hundred thousand people who use Twitter who would want to know about this story, maybe 60K who would read it, as I did. 

4. So how will this gap be filled? How will they find out about this story? 

Well -- they won't. 

But -- if there was a service they could subscribe to that alerted them to stories that would be of interest to them, based on their profile, a lot of people would give it a try. 

In other words, I'm sure there's a place for editorial products delivered via the loosely-coupled 140-character network. 

I tried this with NewsJunk, but it was either too early or there was something wrong with the way we did it. 

It will happen.