Did you get added to a bunch of Twitter lists today with the name “conversationlist”? If so, you’re not alone. No, it’s not a bug or a worm spreading through Twitter, it’s a new service that aims to create a Twitter list for you based on people you actually have conversations with on Twitter.
The idea is very simple: If you’ve @replied someone in the past day, Conversationlist will add them to your “conversationlist” Twitter list. But this person will only stay on that list as long as you keep talking to them. If the next day you don’t @reply them, they’re gone.
That in and of itself is kind of an interesting way to keep track of people that you find interesting enough to want to directly talk to at any given time. But it gets more interesting when others start following your Conversationlist, because it gives them a glimpse of the people you actually talk to on Twitter. And if you’re the type of person who wants to try out Twitter lists but doesn’t want to take the time to make one, this is a pretty simple way to create one that could actually be useful.
According to Conversationlist, there are only ever 25 people on the list they create for you at any given time. If you want to stop it from updating, simply delete the list on Twitter and Conversationlist will stop building it for you each day. To get it working, you only have to click one button on the Conversationlist site, authorize the service via OAuth, and you’re set. Super simple.
Over at http://favstar.fm you can also create ‘my favstar list’ which is initially based on the 20 people whose tweets you recently favorited the most. You can add people to it, and favstar offers other features around the list.
that’s a good idea too, but here’s why it’s not as useful for me: A lot of times I favorite something just to bookmark it to come back later today, not really as an indicator that I like it. Still, since you can add/edit, that’s useful.
Well, without reviewing your list personally, I’d argue it’s still useful. Here’s why – the bookmarked items are tweets that caught your attention, and you do want to check out later. It has some value to you, at least at first glance.
In the wider ecosystem, if many people do the same, those tweet receives more favs, so can be identified as a useful pieces of information.
In your own personal ‘favstar.fm list’, you might be surprised to learn that your ‘bookmark’ favs generally go to the same 20 people more often than others. The first 20 people on this page would go on your list first: http://favstar....slemon/given_to You need to follow @favstar for it to show, but you can unfollow again 24 hours later..
The favstar list is far more useful. People you have conversations with might not be worth putting on a list. But people you click favorite on are definitely much better.
Agreed. Conversations happen with anyone that replies to me (nearly everyone) but the favstar list is great because I favorite only the best.
i’m guessing this is the late night crowd
I think the Conversationalist model could still be useful if they allowed a user-selected duration setting. 1 day may be way too short for most people.
If you could set BOTH the duration and the number of people on the list, and then maybe even allow making several of these with different combinations (e.g. day/week/month), I think they might have something here.
I agree with both sentiments. I think the favstar model is better but, like @parislemon, I also often favourite something purely to remember it for later. I’d love to see Twitter develop bookmarking/flaggin functionality in addition to favourites.
mince my mistake
cool
I will try both suggested methods..
FavStar is a great DISCOVERY tool.
But ConversationList is also good for people who like to converse with others without necessarily needing to keep track of them on an ongoing basis. I guess it could also be used to be more transparent about conversation, except that it doesn’t (yet) track when someone “receives” an @message (instead, AFAIK it only lists users when you write messages @people).
For example, I asked Jay Rosen a question yesterday ( http://twitter....uses/5557674174 ), but he STILL hasn’t replied. I think it would be neat if people could have a list such that they can prominently and transparently show that they are open to discussion, and happy to answer questions rather than to ignore them.
Norbert, thanks for the ideas and feedback on conversationlist (I’m collecting a handful from various users now that the word is out about it and I’m sure we’ll have some additional features coming soon)…I also have an older system I wanted to share with you that might work well for your @ mention problem: http://pu.ly
What pu.ly does is monitor twitter for mentions of your screen name…when someone does mention you, you’ll get an email with the mention details (and you can even just reply to the email to directly post your response through to your twitter account)…
I use it all the time because it means I don’t really have to monitor Twitter myself at all…I just get an email when someone is talking to or about me…all other times, I can just jump over to twitter when I’m looking to kill time.
Anyway – if you have a chance check it out. Thanks!
p.s. It can also alert you on direct messages and you can also just reply to those emails to post your responses back to twitter….
http://www.tech...comment-3086926
Wow – awesome that our little idea is getting so much attention…just a few quick updates:
1. @whitneymcn is the guy behind the conversationlist idea (I just threw the hackish code together)…one of the basic ideas/motivations was to bring back a little bit of how @replies used to work.
2. The system is dead simple, so simple in fact that we threw it together in about a day…the downside to that is that we really didn’t spend much time thinking through the next steps yet or how to expand upon the idea (for example the favs. thing mentioned above is a great idea as well)…
So long story short, it’s out there, we hope some people find it interesting and useful…and we are VERY open to ideas, thoughts, and suggestions on how to improve it or what to do next for you…just ping @falicon or @whitneymcn via twitter
Thanks!
Wanted to give an update that Jay Rosen has now responded to my question + has moved my understanding of “sources go direct” forward (just saying that to clarify the issue I raised above).
I wouldn’t say that it’s now totally clear what he (and I guess Dave Winer) mean by this phrase, but I’ve made a little summary index of our conversation about it @ http://esh.it/t...etween-jayrosen (in case you’re interested in following).
I still think it would be neat if the conversationlist appliacation would also track received @replies (as I indicated above – I hope my explanation wasn’t too confuzzled or whatever
Thanks for both of these apps!
BTW: another hot tip (or should that be a cool app?
is “list tags” (see http://twitter....uses/5547278857 