Some of you might subscribe to my twitter feed you’ll see that I tweet journal articles on a regular basis. In fact, at a recent conference, I was taken to task (in a nice way) about how could tweet so often and, more to the point, how I could have tweeted whilst giving a presentation!
Actually, this is an automated procedure (punctuated with personal tweets on a regular basis). The automated tweets are proving to be popular, at least from the Re-Tweets and the favourite’d tweets.
However, I am aware that not all my tweets are of interest to everybody, all the time. That is, some people might be interested in the Vehicle Routing Problem but don’t really care about Personnel Rostering. There is not a lot I can do about that (if you follow me, you follow me – there is nothing selective about it). I suppose I could set up an individual account for each domain (Vehicle Routing, Travelling Salesman, Personnel Rostering etc.) but that seems a little excessive; not least of all from a maintenance point of view on my part!
Thinking about this, I came up with the idea that I could tweet about one particular topic in a 24 hour period and then change topic for the next 24 hours; and so on. In this way, you would only need to pay particular attention to my twitter feed when you knew I was tweeting about something that you were interested in. The idea is still very much in my head at the moment but I have some ideas about how I would implement this (with a sortof of draft almost done – but much work to do), which I’ll share with you in due course.
A further stage would be to allow people to register for certain domains and, when that domain is selected to be tweeted for the next 24 hours, then I could @message and/or email the person in order to tell them to pay extra attention to my twitter feed for the next 24 hours. But this would test my PHP/SQL skills beyond what they are at the moment, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.
As I say, mostly still in the idea stage at the moment (with some test functionality under development), but definitely something I want to take forward.
More soon, but you might also be interested in my series of Twitter posts, available here.