The Interfolio Blog

Tell me about Tweetworks and about yourself.

Tweetworks is an interactive search engine for conversations.  We help people find and participate in conversations that matters to them most. It's all about relevancy and context, two things that are missing from things like Twitter.

I'm a recovering finance dude.  I saw a problem, that it was difficult to find and follow conversations that were interesting to me on Twitter.  I was just following people, but found that I had a bunch of people that I really wasn't interested in long-term.  Most of us as pros didn't get it, and we had a vested interest in succeeding in it.  The passing user has even less interest - they come, look, and leave.  So Tweetworks helps them find people to talk to about things they have in common.

How did the relationships with universities come about?

Universities, professors, high school teachers and the likes have found Tweetworks on their own. There was a blog post written about social media tools for educators, and there was an inbound link to Tweetworks, Mashable and ReadWriteWeb wrote us up, so those things have contributed to people finding us.  It's been fairly well used in English as a Second Language (ESL) classes.  It's 140-character snippets, it's really easy to compartmentalize conversation, and people can learn English at a small level.  It's small things like "I walked the dog today."

Can you give us an example of how Tweetworks being used in university classrooms this year?

A professor at Brigham Young University started using Tweetworks for his Intro to Communications classes.  The groups on Tweetworks is Comms101.

What I loved about this utilization was that the response was massive - 100 participant threads - and you can't get that on Twitter. When you're on Twitter, once you get more than two or three people in a conversation, you can't add more, because everyone's Twitter handle has to fit into that 140-characters.  There's no more room to Tweet.  It's very constrained in that everything comes in a timeline format, not in a threading format.

Tweetworks allows for people replying in a thread to not have to reply to each individual separately. You can reply to everyone in a comment thread.  Tweetworks then notifies you when you get a response to a specific threads - "there've been replies in conversations in which you've participated in or a groups you're interested in," it let's you know when there are updates. 

What sorts of feedback are you getting from students and faculty?

Everybody wants mobile.  People like it, and I have yet to find someone who uses it who hates it, but they want more.  They wish they could use it on Tweetdeck, or embed it on their blog or class website.

Outside of that, students and faculty find the class usage very powerful, especially in certain disciplines.  I mentioned the benefits to ESL.  It offers a really easy way for people to literally have a non-verbal conversation in short snippets in a new language.

Why is this any better than plain old Twitter?

Tweetworks organizes the experience of using twitter in the classroom or for a class, where you have 20, 50, 100 people using the tool to communicate together. You can see that X conversation is about X class.  Many have tried using hashtags in Twitter, but there are so many problems you can get into - like simply misspelling a hashtag, or forgetting it altogether - that can result in your twitter message getting lost. With Tweetworks, you don't have to sacrifice part of your 140 characters.  You're also less likely to have spam - if you have a trending topic in a hashtag on twitter, you often get spammers. 

In the context of being able to see what's going on and what someone is replying to, it allows you can really follow it.  On Twitter, if you don't use the reply button (which a lot of people don't do) you no longer have any linkage to that person, you don't have threads.  That's all built into the Tweetworks platform.

How do you think Tweetworks enhances group work and collaboration in this setting?  Are there any drawbacks? If so, how are you working through them?

If everyone can see the entire conversation, that's helpful.  They can see everyone's input on a topic.  And not only can they see it, but they can add to that whole conversation, not just a small, quick one like you get on Twitter.

A classic example, I put a tweet out a few months ago about having trouble connecting to a database, and it was frustrating me.  Someone gave me the answer, and so did a bunch of other people, but we weren't using Tweetworks.  None of the other three knew the others had replied to me.  I had to reply to them all separately, and none of them had the opportunity to pick up on the others' insight, and really build on that topic. 

More importantly, that conversation - because it was disparate and unconnected and because Twitter conversations roll in general - it got lost.  On Tweetworks, we've created a knowledge repository. Someone can come later, look for conversations on a particular topic, and get that information.  The other bonus for our classes is that we offer private groups, so they can either take things offline, or separate into groups.

For what other things is Tweetworks being used?

A lot for entertainment topics, a whole bunch of different things.  We're closing in on 3500 groups.  Everything from "All Things WordPress" to yoga.  Some people use it as a directory:  list your name in the Boston Twitter group. There are a whole bunch of different uses for it.

Think of what you could do by adding the extra dimensions of full meta-data to a topic, to a conversation, and being able to thread that.  From an monitoring perspective, you can analyze "what does Mike Langford like to talk about"...that's pretty powerful.  You can find your target audience, and you can find out where else they hang out and what else they're discussing.  What other groups are they in?  Additionally, you can find out who's influential where.

What's with the beak?

Toucan's my favorite bird.  That's it.  It's Tweetworks, something's gotta tweet.  We have a zoo near us, and I'm fascinated by the toucan.  Plus, look at the colors on the toucan.  Beautiful.