Topical Twittering

If you know me or read this blog, you know that I like to keep up on what's happening in the tech world.

I use Google Reader to subscribe to a bunch of blogs. I read TechCrunch, Mashable, Scoble, Monkey Bites and a flurry of others. I often share posts I find interesting, and will read other people's shared feeds.

Lately it seems that the echo chamber is getting louder and louder. Someone will discover a new company or service or idea and blog about it, thus encouraging all the other folks to blog about it, creating a virtual wave of information overload better suited for the department of redundancy department.

While everyone reading isn't necessarily subscribed to all the feeds, it's clear that most of the top bloggers are subscribed to each other, and continue to try to work together to scoop one another while providing the service of feeding the frenzy of modern day technology coverage. This may be why it feels as though the pace of innovation is increasing at an alarming rate, when in actuality it's really just a lot of glorified flirting and voyeurism.

Inevitably, I feel overly massively informed to the point where I'm like a deer caught in headlights and need to turn off the reader and actually go back to work.

Which brings us to Twitter.

For those of you who don't know what Twitter is, meaning you likely don't subscribe to any of the aforementioned blogs, Twitter is a "status broadcasting" service, where you can tell everyone what you're doing at that moment in less than 140 characters. Your status shows up in a public timeline (if you want it to) and is shared with friends through feeds. It's also got a mobile component so you can send out notices while you're on the go.

While I've reduce my Twittering considerably over the past few months, I think there's an incredible resource here to generate group discussion and community participation. Fred Wilson (avid blogger and Twitter investor) sparked a conversation about Twitter's business model, via a comment on someone else's blog, which has undoubtedly been twittered several hundred times by now.

While Twitter is a fabulous technology service, the utility and resource comes in how you use it. If you connect with folks you trust, and care about getting updates from them, then the usability dramatically increases as it's keeping you in the loop on those who you care about, so long as their updates are relevant. The public time line, on the other hand, would be like standing in the lobby of Google watching all the search results fly by on the wall.

This got me thinking...what if there was Orchestrated Topical Twittering? In that someone, the moderator, chosen one, or daily rotated captain sparks a discussion of the day with a question to the community. The virtual conversation could be grouped and fed and organized by topic area as people chimed in to the notion which was on everyone's mind.

Questions like: Why is the sky blue? What's the best alternative energy solution? What letter would have come after Z? Clinton or Obama? How come you always find stuff in the last place you look? (hint: because once you find it, you stop looking)

While this might add to the mayhem of randomness, it will at least be organized randomness and serve a purpose of collectively bringing people together around ideas, which in and of itself is powerful. Somehow it feels like this is the direction things are going. Amidst the chaos, human beings naturally feel the need to be organized, and then chaotic again.

Who knows where we could go from there...