My Lost Twitter Journey

: Image by Long Zheng via Flickr

Make something simple, and let your users build complexity on top of it based on how they are using it, not based on how you think they will use it. To me, that’s a good practice when it comes to the collaborative web. And, the folks at Twitter most likely had that in mind. And, if they didn’t, they lucked out.

Wednesday night was Lost night. And, given the fact that my wife has lost interest in the show, I had to look for excitement elsewhere. So, I went to Twitter. And, after desperately twittering about my love of Lost from the virtual mountain tops, I wasn’t having a lot of luck. Most of my followers either weren’t interested or my words were lost amongst all the other tweets.

So, I tried a few things. The first thing I tried as going to Twitter Search and searching for “Lost night”, and following a bunch of other “losties” twittering from the mountain tops.

Unfortunately, now I was permanently following a bunch of people just so that one night a week I would have Lost companionship. And, their tweets were already going to be buried within a bunch of other tweets. I’m following a lot of people now.

Enter TweetDeck…

TweetDeck is a nifty little program that is basically a twitter command center. And, I had an inspired thought about how to use it along with a convention known as hashtags. You probably already know what tags are. The are simply words used to describe or categorize something on the web to make it more searchable. Tweets contain hashtags with a ‘#’ followed by the tag name.

Below is screenshot along with my annotations:

In the above screenshot, there are three panel that are circled. Each panel contains tweets based on a particular filter, except for the TweetScoop panel,which I’ll explain below:

From left to right…

Replies to me – filtered based on the ‘@purecognition’ being located at the beginning of the tweet.
TweetScoop - A tag cloud showing me what terms are popular based on how often they appear in tweets. Their size indicates their amount of usage.
Lost Tweets- filtered based on ‘#lost’ appearing in a tweet.

So, for all intents and purposes, a Lost chat room is molded from the ether simply by enough people collectively using the hashtag #lost. I can read their tweets, reply to them, and get their replies in my reply panel. I can also see what topics are gaining the most prominence at any point in time during Lost with the tag cloud.

One interesting thing that happened was during a scene where a character said something to the effect of, “I guess we aren’t going to Guam.” It amused so many people that a lot of them tweeted his words. And, over in the tag cloud the word “Guam” got HUGE!

I literally got to watch a piece of the English speaking world watch Lost. This really hightened the experience, especially due to the fact that it was already a really good episode.

At the end of the episode, one of the Twitterers invited everyone back to his place to chat and listen to a live video of a Lost discussion at a sight called Generally Speaking Production Network. It was like in college when you are at a bar and someone says, “Hey, we are heading over to a party, wanna come?”

I didn’t stay long, as I had work in the morning. But, before going to bed, I checked out my counter on my blog. The counter said 316, which was the name of the Lost episode. Lost and coincidental numbers go hand-in-hand, thus making that little coincidence a great deal more omenous and a great ending to a formative collaborative web experience.

Lost has a prominent place in the Web 2.0 world. If you want to see this, just look at this article. Also, go to Lostpedia and The Lost Experience.

I realize that Lost, as super awesome as it is, is a TV show. So, I hope using it to make the point at the beginning of this blog entry didn’t trivialize it. The experience is important because it was organically created by the following:
Twitter + Established Conventions such as HastTags + Twitter API + TwitDeck = My Lost Twitter Experience. Not by one single centralized organization, but by decentralized communities of users, developers, and fans.

Very cool.

TweetDeck makes Twitter tolerable (wheelontheweb.wordpress.com)
Lost as book and the books of Lost (readmorebooks.wordpress.com)
What is it About TweetDeck, Web 2.0′s Bloomberg Terminal? (micropersuasion.com)

Share and Enjoy:

Tags: Collaborative Web, Lost, Lost Experience, Lostpedia, Software Development, Tag cloud, Television, TweetDeck, Twitter, Twitter Search, Web 2.0

Software Development, Web 2.0 | Nathan | February 22, 2009 12:53 am

7 Comments

By Tac Anderson, February 23, 2009 @ 6:51 pm

Great example, while I’m not a Lost fan I’ve has simular experiences watching SuperBowl commercials, the Inauguration and other events while on Twitter and yes, TweetDeck is an invaluable tool. IMO Twitter would be useless w/out TweetDeck.
By Jerry Okorie, April 8, 2009 @ 8:09 am

It’s true that Tweetdeck makes keeping up with things so much easier – and I hear that more functionality is in the pipeline!
By rapidshare tv shows, June 13, 2009 @ 2:01 pm

I love twitter.
By Myspace Layouts from myspacefresh.com, July 19, 2009 @ 7:08 pm

I like twitter too
By Twitter Lover, July 21, 2009 @ 11:48 am

I’ve actually started using Tweetdeck the other day, it’s awesome! Makes life very easy.
By compare college grades, August 14, 2009 @ 9:39 pm

twitter sure has come along way. In the beginning, i didn’t want to use it. but it has so many more features now.