A post from Paul Bradshaw at the Online Journalism Blog directed me to this one. It’s a site called twellow, which has been constructed as a yellow pages for twitter users. And for journalists on Twitter, it has the potential to be a huge resource.
Need to track down people by field? Location? It’s a searchable resource. It has its issues. For example, a huge number of people in journalism and blogging are just listed under the media category, and there is no clear way to edit your listing or add yourself to categories – which twellow apparently pulls from people’s Twitter descriptions. So for example, Twitter queen Laura Fitton (aka Pistachio) only shows under one category – geeks. (I’m not saying the one category is *wrong*, mind you.) Clearly, she brings more to the table than geekiness. I’m in media, but not news.
Steve Garfield… has no category. (Hmmm, I don’t know where I’d put him either.)
And it doesn’t seem to recognize tweets into the system from some platforms. None of my posts via twhirl show up, for example.
Despite the flaws, it’s an interesting start. And a great entree to find new and interesting people you might not have known were on Twitter in a given field. I’ll be playing with it more.
They could have a people category…
Everything is miscellaneous.
A good supplemental resource is http://twitterpacks.pbwiki.com/
…a little more unruly because people can edit it but it often provides a little more detail about individuals – but not as many categories.
Under “bloggers,” they have listed 88. More are generic than people. I could identify only 7 of the people. I think this is a very good idea, but it needs work.
Categorization is a definite challenge, especially if they are trying to parse it from the rather sparse Twitter profile data. Steve may be right that almost anyone could be miscellaneous – but I’m not sure that makes the directory concept effective. I’d love to find interesting people in certain subject areas – and while I can ask a group of people I know for recommendations, that can be a little bit of a closed loop.
But as Shel rightly points out, they need a little work…