Does Twitter Have a Role in the Workplace? A Directory Project Thinks it Can Help
Did you know that there are more than 100 people who work in the Oil and Gas industries who use Twitter? There are more than 400 people on Twitter who say they work in a field related to accounting, 115 professional language translators, 75 people who sew or are tailors and 33 people in the Air Force. How well is your industry represented on Twitter? Wouldn’t you like to find those people to connect with them?
Twellow is an automatically generated directory of Twitter users, organized by occupation. It offers to help users quickly ramp up productive use of the popular microblogging service by finding people with common interests. New features were unveiled on the service today that will make it even more useful.
How Does It Work?
A service of news organization WebProNews, Twellow grabs publicly available Twitter messages, then looks at the bio fields of the users who published them. Those bios are analyzed for a variety of keywords that are then used to categorize the users by occupation or interest. Twellow says it is actively developing ways to search for users on other social network by occupational category as well.
What’s New?
Today Twellow rolled out an easy way to log-in to their service and associate your profile there with your accounts on other services. For example, nonprofit consultant Ian Wilker (see below) has associated his Twitter account with his accounts on places like Delicious, FriendFeed and LInked in via Twellow. That’s useful for context, richer communication and forming further connections.
We think this kind of simple keyword parsing for categorization has a lot of potential. Twitter in particular is a great way to communicate quickly with groups of people, but it’s particularly valuable if you can add people with common interests to your network. Twellow is an important service that’s worth spending a few minutes with and keeping track of for the future.
You can find RWW writers in conversation on Twitter here.
