Use Twitter for Work With Twellow
Does Twitter Have a Role in the Workplace? A Directory Project Thinks it Can Help
Did you know that there are more than 100 people who work in the Oil and Gas industries who use Twitter? There are more than 400 people on Twitter who say they work in a field related to accounting, 115 professional language translators, 75 people who sew or are tailors and 33 people in the Air Force. How well is your industry represented on Twitter? Wouldn't you like to find those people to connect with them?
Twellow is an automatically generated directory of Twitter users, organized by occupation. It offers to help users quickly ramp up productive use of the popular microblogging service by finding people with common interests. New features were unveiled on the service today that will make it even more useful.
How Does It Work?
A service of news organization WebProNews, Twellow grabs publicly available Twitter messages, then looks at the bio fields of the users who published them. Those bios are analyzed for a variety of keywords that are then used to categorize the users by occupation or interest. Twellow says it is actively developing ways to search for users on other social network by occupational category as well.
What's New?
Today Twellow rolled out an easy way to log-in to their service and associate your profile there with your accounts on other services. For example, nonprofit consultant Ian Wilker (see below) has associated his Twitter account with his accounts on places like Delicious, FriendFeed and LInked in via Twellow. That's useful for context, richer communication and forming further connections.
We think this kind of simple keyword parsing for categorization has a lot of potential. Twitter in particular is a great way to communicate quickly with groups of people, but it's particularly valuable if you can add people with common interests to your network. Twellow is an important service that's worth spending a few minutes with and keeping track of for the future.
You can find RWW writers in conversation on Twitter here.
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I added myself to Twellow a couple of days ago. It looks like something that will be useful to letting people find me. My keywords are *kinda* right, but they don't quite capture the true "mediaChick brand". I'll have to rethink my copy on all my Internet profile so my keywords reflect who I am better. That being said, it's helped me already!
Cool!
Down here in Asheville (a great town, but not exactly a hub of the web biz), I've depended heavily on twitter to keep me within earshot of my professional community's daily doings. So yeah, twitter's a crucial workplace tool for me. Perhaps the most important thing it does is give me access to others who do the kinds of things I do but for other organizations -- I learn a huge amount from others, thinking aloud about problems they're working.
Summize gave us all the means to explore/navigate/track twitter via keyword, and that was huge. But it's also great to have a directory of users profiles organized around the affinities of twitter peeps, and that's what twellow does.
pssst, Marshall -- imagine my surprise at seeing my mug staring back at me here. Much appreciated!
They have Friendfeed support... I didn't noticed that the last time I've checked the site. And it looks like they've added some other features as well.
Posted by: Orli Yakuel
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August 8, 2008 12:47 PM
LOL, all the comments are from "social media consultants"!
Not seeing the Oil and Gas crew...
That sounds interesting. Fine way to add new people to gather more content. The feature to parse and categorize people is sure a nice one. But is that really useful since we do have summize that has the difference to give access to relevant tweets from any people. In the Twellow case, the search process is in reverse mode: we do look for a categorie and then check if users in a particular caterogy is actually speaking of what we need.
Sounds strange, it won't change the way we use Twitter, and won't help people join the conversation. IMHO.
You can also perform simple searches in LinkedIn with the term 'twitter' to identify people in your industry who use twitter and other social media applications. This can prove helpful when researching companies.