Dear Twitter,
I use your service for pretty specific things, usually remembering quotes I’ve heard when I’m at a conference. I realize this isn’t why you created your service, but unintended consequences and all. So for me, it would be really great if you could let me tag my twits. I know that sounds kind of insane and granular, and the folks that don’t like Twitter will think that’s just crazy talk, but it would allow me to do things like aggregate the great Anil Dash quotes I heard at this week’s Microsoft Social Computing Symposium (most of which I didn’t even get recorded). ‘Cause believe me, the guy is just brilliant and he rattles them off one after the other, on the backchannel and everywhere else. And maybe then I could create my own little random Dash quote generator or something.
So unless I’m already missing a way I might otherwise do this, if you could just implement one more way for me to categorize my lifestream, that would be really great.
Thanks. Your pal,
Jenny
(who is blogging this sitting a foot away from Michael Gorman in the Louisville airport — heh; who knew his ringtone is “when the saints go marching in”.…)
Now *that* is funny.
And I know you intended to say tags with feeds. Run that feed into one of those widget tools and… yup, lots of great possibilities.
Comment by Steve Matthews — September 20, 2007 @ 4:00 pm
Steve, you are so right — *of course* I meant with feeds. In fact, it’s such a given for me that I forgot to actually say that.
I have different groups of people, beyond just Flickr’s “friends” and “family,” and I need more granularity in order to feed them. I can tag pictures in Flickr, I can tag bookmarks in del.icio.us, I can finally tag my blog posts, but I can’t tag my Facebook updates or my twits. I should be able to aggregate a tag’s feeds across all of my digital channels automatically and then get those groups to track their feeds. Or I could display those feeds in different places. I don’t necessarily want to aggregate my entire lifestream for everyone, and the software should be smart enough to do the heavy lifting for me if I do the initial work of tagging.
Comment by jenny — September 20, 2007 @ 4:21 pm
Create a quote blog for your quotes and just use Jott.com to post them every-time you say one, the RSS feed would come free.
You could probably put the same blog with different tags in Jott a few times and easier chose the other tags.
I’m talking nonsense since you didn’t mention Jott, but I think it’ll help your sorting (and you can verbalize the quotes in stead of typing).
Comment by Gary LaPointe — September 23, 2007 @ 8:36 pm
Thanks, Gary, but I don’t want the footprint of another blog, especially one I won’t be posting to frequently. In addition, these are quotes I hear others say, not me, so it doesn’t start out as voice and I’m usually not in a situation where I could talk into a phone. In most instances, I need to text rather than talk, as I’m in a room full of people.
What I’m really looking for are lightweight tools (like Twitter) that let me do a little heavy lifting on the way in (tagging) in order to stream content to specific people, groups, or places. So what I’m asking Twitter for is the ability for the texts I send to be tagged into that stream.
Comment by jenny — September 23, 2007 @ 9:34 pm
Jenny, If you use Outlook, you can use OutTwit to pull your tweets into Outlook, where you’ll be able to sort/categorize them like any other Outlook messages. Check it out, let us know what you think.
http://www.TechHit.com/OutTwit/
Comment by Tech Hit — September 26, 2007 @ 4:00 pm
Great idea–I’ve found myself posting things to twitter so I won’t forget them when I don’t have time even to put them in del.icio.us.
I’m also hoping Twitter will allow establishing different identities for one logon–so you could have your “quotation” identity and another identity. I want it so I can have different “groups” that I can switch around among
I’ve been pondering using Tumblogs for quotes–it does have RSS by the way. It’s a blog sans comments, and meant more for that sort of thing.
Comment by Carolyn Foote — September 30, 2007 @ 7:11 am
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I’ve been wondering when the website will emerge that gathers quotations and allows for tagging them.… Like a del.icio.us for quotations.… Sounds like that’s what your proposing, but perhaps we need a totally separate site for that–so the two functions aren’t confused (“folksonomizing” quotes vs. microblogging).
Comment by Richard Smyth — March 26, 2008 @ 9:07 am