GroupTweet Enhances Twitter
April 12th, 2008 (8:38am) Mike Gunderloy 7 Comments
One of the persistent complaints about Twitter is that it doesn’t offer any sort of “group” functionality: messages from everyone you follow come in as a big heap, and anything you say goes to all of your followers. GroupTweet provides a solution for the second half of this complaint, by layering distribution groups on top of Twitter.
Using GroupTweet is simple: create a separate account on Twitter for your group, and have everyone in your group follow that account. Then whenever that account gets a direct message, it pushes it back out for everyone to see. I expect to be using this to share statuses among some distributed teams I’m working with.
7 Comments Post your own comment
Robert S. Robbins says: April 13th, 2008 6:42am
I follow you on Twitter. Are you the same Mike Gunderloy who used to publish Factsheet Five?
Mike Gunderloy says: April 13th, 2008 7:31am
Hi Robert. Yes, there’s only one of me - though Factsheet Five was many moons ago.
Danny says: April 13th, 2008 12:02pm
Are direct messages seen by followers? That isn’t my understanding of the Twitter engine but I am frequently wrong.
Aaron Forgue says: April 13th, 2008 12:07pm
Danny,
In the case of GroupTweet, direct messages you send to the group account are only seen by followers of the group account. By sending a direct message to your group account, it keeps it hidden from all of your personal Twitter account followers.
Make sense?
Aaron
Ali Daniali says: April 13th, 2008 3:48pm
Aaron I set up a group tweeter account ’seatechstartups’ and it seems that I have to manually follow the followers to allow them to direct message.
But this then publishes my tweets to my tweeter account ‘thedevguy’ to the everyone else, not just my direct messages to ’seatechstartups’.
I’ve emailed you separately but haven’t gotten a reply yet.
-Ali
Aaron Forgue says: April 13th, 2008 5:00pm
Ali,
If a person wants to be part of the “seatechstartups” group, they need to follow that group in Twitter. If you made the status updates private for the group account, then all group members’ follow requests must be manually approved.
Once a person is following the “seatechstartups” group, they can send a message to everyone in that group by direct texting the group (e.g. ‘D seatechstartups Hello everyone!’). Since it is a direct text, their personal followers won’t see the message unless they are part of the group.
I just ran a test with my group account and everything is running fine.
Danny says: April 14th, 2008 5:44pm
Aaron, it does make sense. I was applying “normal” Twitter behavior to GroupTweet where the rules are different, hence the value of your service. Thanks much for the guidance!
Danny