A yellow pages for Twitter - Twellow.com
Here’s a great resource for Twitter users and journalists: Twellow.com: a yellow pages for Twitter. At the time of writing the site has indexed over 330,000 people and placed them in dozens of categories (e.g. Accounting with 339 users) and subcategories (e.g. 59 under Financial Advisors).
The site is actually as much news service as directory - click to a category such as Healthcare and you’ll get a timeline of tweets from users in that category. You can sort those by ‘most followed’ or by recency. And there are RSS feeds for categories too. In that sense, it’s similar to the excellent Twitter-based news service TweetWire.com.
That aside, this is a godsend for specialist journalists who can quickly build up a list of twitterers in their field. It’s also searchable.
A couple of weaknesses, however - although you can add yourself to the directory here, I can’t find any way to edit your listing. I’m under one category: media > blogging, which seems fair enough. But you could argue I should be listed under education and even geeks, too, while a search for ‘journalist’ does not bring me up. Clearly some tweaking of my user profile is needed.
A bigger weakness is the fact that currently there is no way to filter users by location: as a result, results are dominated by US users who tend to have more followers than non-US equivalents.
If they supplied an RSS feed of search results (which would also be useful), it might be possible to create a filter yourself. Until then, this is still an essential bookmark.
9 Comments, Comment or Ping
Ted McEnroe
Another weakness I see is that it doesn’t seem to recognize tweets from some platforms - so some active people don’t show up as all that active. (None of my twhirl posts over the past six weeks actually show in their database.) That said, they have made a noteworthy start. And it made me log in to twitter.com to post just to freshen myself up.
Jun 25th, 2008
Jessica Barlow
I have moved away from researching twitter as I did far too much of it for my dissertation, or at least I felt I did.
Twitter, social networking tools/apps, and breaking news platforms are developing at such an alarming rate it is hard to keep up with what is going on and what everyone is using. Having not checked your blog paul or kept out of the online development hub I have already in such a short space of time missed out of the development of twitter and new developments in online journalism because of it. This proves my point.
Twellow is an amazing hybrid of and ’sub-genre’ of Twitter, and the power of the internet is allowing the idea and sense of cybersociety a reality.
Jun 30th, 2008
Janice King
I have trouble distingusihing exactly how it all works. Im not too sure what gets read or what doesnt. But either way I still use it.
Apr 20th, 2009
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