Tracking, Discoverability and the Future

Since what seems like forever Steve Gillmor has been lobbying to get the TRACK function back into Twitter. And apart from the Newsgang-crowd he seems to be alone doing that. At least here in Germany nobody seems to bother all that much. When IM and TRACK did work I had Twitter in a GTalk sidebar working nicely, showing me updates from followees and soon to be followees, i.e. people who share the same interests as I do. Gillmor put it into plain Engish again last week. TRACK is a discoverability-tool, expanding your network based not on people you know or live near-by, but based on shared topics.

Identi.ca, a much talked about microblogging tool and Twitter-challenger does not offer the TRACK-functionality but does not limit a “Spy”-bot “drinking from the firehouse”, to use Gillmor’s metaphor. With this bot I can TRACK some of my interests such as podcast, NHL, shanahan, extreme, kanal 14, planetsab and others. And the spy-bot delivers:

As you can see, all of a sudden, news are not only coming in through people I want to know about but also through topics I want to know about. The thing is, I did not realise how important this feature is, until it was reinstated through identica. Though identica has a much smaller user base than Twitter at the moment, the results coming in through TRACK have proven to be very helpful.

Mix this with the highly useful zaptxt via IM, and you have all the live input you need to put you either ahead or make you nuts.