Terry Jones

One thing I’d like to be able to do in Twitter is change my point of view. That is, see what Twitter looks like from the POV of another user.

Given Twitter’s asymmetric follower model and the prevalence of @ messaging, it’s very common to run across a fragment of a conversation that seems potentially interesting. It’s also common not to be following the full set of people who are interacting.

For example, four people might be exchanging tweets on a subject, and you may follow just one of them. So you’ll see roughly one quarter of the thread. Right now, to get the context for the discussion you need to go take a look at the archives of the various people and try to piece the conversation together. You have to do this one tweeter at a time. Or you could temporarily follow the people involved and then page backwards through time to see the flow of tweets. With some work on the server side, Twitter could let you see this using the Twitter search interface (you’d need to put in the names of the various parties though).

It would be much simpler and much cooler to just to click a link besides a user’s name and get that user’s POV. You’d see what they see, except for the people whose tweets are private and which you’re prevented from seeing by the Twitter permission system. Not only could you see more or all of a conversation, I bet it would be really interesting to see Twitter from someone else’s POV. You could click on the @Replies tab to see all replies to that user, etc. There’s no reason why not – it’s all public data, and you can easily fetch the @replies using the search interface. I think wandering around inside the Twitterverse jumping from the POV of one identity to another would be fascinating. It reminds me of wandering around inside the wayback machine, except it’s the present.

That would all be pretty easy to implement, even for a 3rd party using the Twitter API. It would be nice if Twitter were to implement it themselves. I could do the basics myself in a few hours, but I’d rather not. This is also something that could be accessed via a Firefox extension or Greasemonkey – install it and get an extra button next to every tweet. The button switches you to the POV of the tweeter.

All we need is someone to build it.

I have several more Twitter blog posts I’d love to write. The most interesting, to me, is all about evolutionary biology, sex, and the meaning of life itself. But no time, no time. I’ve finally added a Twitter category to this blog, and was surprised to find 14 posts that fit it. Am I obsessed?

As usual, make sure you follow me :-)

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