One effective way to understand where to put paved paths is to look at places where the grass has been trodden. Twitter has adopted this approach by offering a minimal interface and looking at how people use it.The idea was to allow basic messaging, and not to worry too much about fancy functionality. The tweeters responded by overlaying a number of conventions onto the simple message body. RT, the equivalent of forwarding in e-mail, is a popular convention for cascading news along the social graph, and is one of the central mechanisms responsible for the effectiveness of Twitter as a news dissemination channel.

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tribescape is a newish entry into the social search arena that allows searchers to share search results with their peers through Twitter.  Rather than e-mailing URLs, you simply click on button next to each search result, pick the followers to whom you want to tweet this result, and you’re done. Convenient, yes. Collaborative? Maybe.

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We’ve created some archives of twitter conversations for SIGIR 2009 and for some of the workshops associated with the conference. These archives are useful because Twitter messages tend to evaporate after a while.

I know of the following archives:

• SIGIR09 proper, based on the #sigir09 and #sigir hashtags
• The IREval workshop based on the #ireval09 hahstag
• The SSM workshop based on the #ssm09 hashtag

If the other workshops had significant traffic, I am happy to archive & update the list above.  TwapperKeeper is a service that archives twitter searches based on a specified hashtag. The data is then available through the web site and for download in tab- or semicolon-separated format. Saving your own copy means that you can refer to it later, and also makes it easier to do data mining or other research on the use of Twitter. I encourage people to download archives (although as new tweets come in the archives will get updated on TwapperKeeper) to make sure they persist even if TwapperKeeper doesn’t. Archive early, archive often.

I attended JCDL 2009 this week, and had the opportunity to do some live tweeting of several papers and panel sessions. It was an interesting experience that I thought was worth summarizing here. Overall, it was difficult to get the messages right, it was a challenge to listen and type at the same time, the 140 character constraint was an issue some of the time, and my tweeting had a couple of effects on my Twitter network. And of course there is the question of utility of this endeavor.

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