Meeting Jeremiah’s Developer Challenge
Hi Everyone,
Today, Jeremiah Owyang created a post issuing a challenge to developers to create a crowd managed feed reader:
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/04/11/developer-challenge-create-a-crowd-created-feed-reader
I’m glad he did. We’re definitely thinking the same thing. Jeremiah outlines the following pain point:
“Finding people on Twitter, then following them is already a challenge. Sharing your hard earned list takes time. I deal with a lot of executives at companies, that want to quickly scan the topics in their industry, or see what their employees, customers, and competitors are doing. Searching by keyword isn’t sufficient. Carter Lusher has this large Twitter list of analysts, but in order to see their streams, adding each one is a manual process.”
A ChatterBox allows just this capability. When configuring a ChatterBox, you can define a list of interesting topics and can filter those topics to a set of Twitter handles. You can then invite other users to participate with you in the ChatterBox. Not only can those participants respond back right to Twitter right though the ChatterBox, but the threaded conversations can also be assigned, categorized, tagged and put into workflow.
Once the ChatterBox is created, users can create their own custom views and RSS feeds into the information. Individual users can create an unlimited number of ChatterBoxes. So, you can create one ChatterBox to follow a set of concepts/handles and another to interact with your business partners to respond to tweets through a common process.
Jeremiah Outlines the following use cases (in quotes):
“I want to track all analysts in my industry, then I could [give] my executives a single URL so they can observe”
Yes, we do this out of the box. Additionally, you could create a view/RSS feed for that executive and assign them the ones they should read so that they do not need to filter through the full list.
“give a sales rep a single webpage to see all the tweets coming out of their client”
We also do this out of the box.
“professional to quickly track all their industry counterparts tweets”
Again, we do this out of the box. We also let the professional tag, categorize and archive the tweets so that they can be viewed and searched at a later point in time.
We think there are some other interesting use cases, including:
- PR agency that wants to set up a shared workspace with their client as part of their social media program.
- Team that wants to easily share the responsibility of responding to tweets.
ChatterBox capabilities like assignment and prioritization can also be used to better streamline management of responses. The are many more use cases, many of which we can’t wait to learn when our users come up with them.
Jeremiah also lists some required features (in quotes):
“Allow anyone to create a public stream of Twitter users, later it could evolve to include blogs and articles.”
We will allow users to create a stream of tweets that can be shared amongst ChatterBox users. The stream itself will not be public, but it could potentially be in future releases. Adding other content sources for elements that can be pulled into a ChatterBox is high on our list of priorities.
“It should allow members to submit themselves to these lists, or allow anyone to volunteer others.”
The ChatterBox creator (moderator) can invite others into the collaboration space in the initial release. We don’t have an option for other people to submit or volunteer other members. That could be added if it becomes highly requested.
“Have administrative controls.”
Yes, we have administrative controls although they are limited in the first release. This is an area we will focus on enhancing.
“It should be public.”
We won’t have fully public facing information available in the initial release. We are thinking about pages for public facing information, like latest updates, status and background information.
“Be easy to use.”
We hope so, but we’ll really know when users start providing feedback.
“Have further features that allow very large feeds to segment by a variety of filters perhaps by location, popularity, and other metadata.”
ChatterBox will have meta-data capabilities for assignment, categorization, prioritization, status and tagging. All of those values are configurable. Other data elements could be tracked as tags or through future potential enhancements.
“Aggregate then prioritize. Feeds on their own are a bit messy, if you’re not in front of in real-time you may miss something. This feature should bubble up the most important tweets based on popularity or weight.”
Yes, we agree. We won’t be there from day 1. It’s definitely something on our radar, though.
Please check out Jeremiah’s post. We’re very excited by the vision he outlines for this type of solution. ChatterBox will be here soon and we can’t wait for you to start using it and providing feedback. I’ll definitely keep you updated on our progress. We would love to hear your ideas as well!
Thanks for the time!
- Charlie
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Charlie Chatterbox
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Jeremiah Owyang April 12, 2009 | 6:43am
Thanks for this post Charlie, I look forward to seeing the next iteration. Perhaps you could demo it by aggregating Carter Lusher’s list of analysts on Twitter.