I may be a scruffy, untrained blogger but I can still appreciate the work of traditional professional technology analysts. SageCircle is an analyst analyst firm, they track the analyst industry. Their emails and podcasts are an inspiration - dense with information and loads of fun. (If you like that kind of thing.)
SageCircle has been maintaining a list of tech analysts with Twitter accounts and the list is now up to 724 active users. It's a cool list and I thought it would be a good thing to put into TweepML, a wonderful Twitter group-creation service we reviewed earlier this month. The link for following all the analysts is below.
]]> Visit this link and you'll find the first 500 analysts on the list. Scroll down to the very bottom of the page, enter your Twitter username and password and click follow. Of course you could also deselect people you'd rather not follow, or deselect all and just follow the ones you know or look interesting.Then at the top of the page you'll see a bit.ly link to part 2. With three clicks of your mouse you can add the daily minute wisdom of 724 tech analysts to your life. It takes awhile for the system to add all of your new friends, and at one point I got a message that my Twitter account was temporarily suspended - but that didn't turn out to be true. That said, open this magic box of wisdom at your own risk.
Think this sounds like a bad idea? Not if you believe that online noise is good for you or you know how to use the secret weapon of the social web, effective and strategic creation of groups.
Thanks a bunch to Carter Lusher of SageCircle, @carterlusher, for building and maintaining this list.
Want to do something to help, yourself? Go create a new Twitter account, follow all these people, then follow these instructions to create an OPML file of all the analysts' feeds using Dave Winer's tool for that. Then, upload that OPML file to Google Reader and you'll be able to search through the history of these analysts' tweets, in some cases as far as 2 or 3 years back! Then post that OPML file somewhere, or send it to me, so I can share it with everyone else reading this.
What would you do with 724 new analyst friends on Twitter? I'm going to spend some time with a text file of all the usernames and a Tweetdeck column. It sure would be nice if Tweetdeck supported bulk import and export of groups.
In an interview yesterday, in preparation for the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, John Borthwick of Betaworks (a Tweetdeck investor) said that interoperability and innovation based on groups are something the team is working on. I think this group of analysts on Twitter is just one of many examples of value that can be derived from group creation.
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