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Ask YC: New twitter utility?

1 points by TrevorJ ↗ HN
This morning I was thinking about how I like to use Twitter primarily as a way to keep my finger on the pulse of different sectors of the world. Twitter is great since you get ground-level real time knowledge from people in the know, but you already knew that.

Twitter makes it hard to manage your stream though, so I am proposing a site called "Twitchboard" Think of it as alltop for Twitter. Twitchboard would identify (by hand to some extent) the top 100 or so quality Twitter mavens in any one of several categories and allow you to see the steam from that category.

-Politics -Technology -Arts and Entertainment -Business -Regional interests

I've run into a TON of great Twitters in all those areas, but it's not something I'd want filling up my entire feed all the time, it would be a lot more useful I you could go "Hmm, lets listen to what people in and around the world of politics are saying today" and Boom* you can check it out before rolling over and seeing what the most active sports people are talking about.

What do you guys think? Is there something like this out there? Would it be handy?

2 comments

[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 17.4 ms ] thread
iamdave
http://summize.com/
TrevorJ
That does do a decent job if I already know what micro topic I want to hear about like "Plaxo" or "Earthquake" but it's not a great tool for discovering what the hot topic is for certain subsets of people. I'd love to know what the hot topic of debate is among political circles for instance, but if I type in "Senate Bill" I'm not discovering what what people in the know are talking about, I'm defining the topic already by my search term which limits the discoveries I could make.

If I type in "sports" I get a bunch of returns that use that word, but that doesn't tell me what people who are in the inner circle of the sporting world are thinking about today-who knows, they might be Tweeting about How NFL Players are organizing aid relief to China, but I'm going to miss seeing that since the search term doesn't show up.

What I want to be able to do is to see what the top 100 or so Twitterers in any given field are talking about without having to know beforehand what I'm searching for.

Summarize is a great tool in it's own right, just not the same tool as I'm talking about :-)

-Edit the "trending topics" does something similar, but that's an aggregate of all tweets, not a feed from people connected with specific areas of expertise.