Nerve Endings Firing Away

Twitter has emerged as the latest katta ^[1] or the place where casual conversations occur on a daily basis. Thanks to Twitter’s default settings, my conversation with @cgawker will only be seen in timelines of people who follow both of us and at times, they join in. Just like @parags did today. We had a great time discussing Karnala fort ^[2] and other forts worth hiking in Maharashtra. This conversation started simply when @cgawker noticed Karnala’s obvious resemblance to certain anatomical details (image that inspired it). Similarly, earlier in the day, @cgawker and I had another unrelated conversation with @twilightfairy about a wedding processing in her gated residential community and @rehabc chimed in too with everyone ultimately ended up ranting on homeowner associations’ weird policies.

By the way, this isn’t a daily summation of my Twitter conversation but I wanted to highlight the richness of conversations that happen on Twitter everyday. It isn’t one of those mediums where the stereotypical criticism of ‘who wants to read what you had for breakfast’ applies ^[3]. But more often than not, Twitter’s linear structure fails to capture these conversations. These conversations may seem trivial but often contain tons of information. Consider a conversation thread that starts with someone’s tweeting about the awesome dinner he had at a Malvani restaurant ^[4] and instantly people chime in with places where they have had excellent Malvani cuisine as well. This thread in entirety replete with entree suggestions, parking tips, locations, etc. would be a treasure trove for someone who missed this conversation just because it was happening while he was asleep.

Twitter recently attempted to collate this information by allowing you to select your location for displaying local trending topics instead of global ones. This lets you focus your attention of what is happening in your vicinity and thus maybe directly useful to you. But often, useful information is not always local and like the conversations above, it may simply be of nostalgic value if not tangible. Thanks to Twitter’s open and flexible API, there have been several tools that have attempted to isolate relevant information.

Sparse.ly

Sparse.ly (formerly Flocking.me) displays trends within people you are following so you are spared the noise of what the rest of the world is talking about. You can also search for specific keywords within your friends tweets. Further, you also have a choice of seeing where your friends are tweeting from on Google Maps. If you are not following one of those prolific tweeters like say, Scoble but instead have him on a Twitter list, you can even see the trending topics within that list and search for keywords also within that list. I have a list called Tech Pundits where I follow a bunch of technology gurus but since they are constantly tweeting, I don’t want them to flood my timeline. I check my list occasionally for important updates but Sparse.ly helps me minimize that to just once a day. I can see the trending topics in the Tech Pundits list or search for specific information I have been looking for and I’ve saved precious hours ^[5]. I wish Sparse.ly had a choice for selecting the timeline for the trends as Cadmus (see below) has.

Cadmus

Cadmus is an invaluable app for catching up on conversations that I was talking about earlier (via). As you see, my conversations with twilightfairy and cgawker have floated to the top with all the tweets contained as a chronological thread that you can go back and catch up on or even click the links you may have missed. This nested replies within popular tweets (accessible by clicking the little thought bubble below each topic) is one of my favorite features. You don’t have to be a part of the conversation for it to show up on your page but it will only show tweets and conversations between people that you are following. This may be a noise-eliminating feature but some may see it as a bug if you want to follow conversations between the persons whom you are following and their followers.

Additionally, you can select different timelines for seeing which conversations were ‘hot’ in that time period. As with Sparse.ly, you can see personal trending topics in your timeline although I’m not sure why the two are different ^[6]. The corresponding RTs for individual tweets are also archived under Related Posts. Finally, Cadmus also imports RSS feeds ^[7] and displays trending posts in the same interface including any links or RTs to the post by your followers. You can directly tweet any post extracted from your RSS feed list by clicking the Share button. I just hope Cadmus maintains its simple interface and doesn’t go the HootSuite way of adding every possible feature.

These two tools in combination are perfect for catching up on activity on your Twitter timeline if you have been away for a day or two. Not only do they collate conversations that are integral to Twitter but also make searching much more efficient. After all, hasn’t Google taught us that all the information in the world is useless if you have no way to organize and search through it?

Footnotes:

1. a Bombay term for college hangout spot [↩]
2. A bird sanctuary near an old fort on the Bombay-Goa Highway [↩]
3. Although such people and tweets exist too but you always have the choice of not following them rather than ranting about them. [↩]
4. When I was in Bombay circa 1990s, Goa Portuguesa and Sindhudurg were great places to get Malvani food [↩]
5. yes, sometimes you don’t have to know everything the instant it happens [↩]
6. Hashtags seem to be missing from Sparse.ly list [↩]
7. You can export your OPML file from Google Reader and import it to Cadmus [↩]