There’s some very interesting discussion circling now about the use of channels in Twitter. Most every Twitter user is well aware that groups are a fundamentally lacking feature in the system - perhaps it’s a strength, not a weakness.

Chris Messina has prepared what can only be described a working specification for the implementation of Channels, a la IRC, in Twitter. There are some great observations, so I recommend reading the whole post. For the unwilling, here’s a few useful excerpts:

What I’ve realized is that this “channel” concept meets many of the aggregate desires expressed in various “Groups for Twitter” discussions while not inheriting a lot of the unnecessary management cruft that most group systems seem to suffer from, it is easily accessible adapting current Twitter syntax and convention, it’s easy to learn and lightweight, it’s very flexible and entirely folksonomic and works with people’s current behaviors, rather than forcing anyone to learn anything radically new. It also keeps the interface aspects to a minimum (as I’ll soon explain), invents little by borrowing from age old IRC conventions also adopted by an existing web application and, from what Britt said so far, actually works consistently on cell phones (whereas, for example, the star key does not).

[…]

Every time someone uses a channel tag to mark a status, not only do we know something specific about that status, but others can eavesdrop on the context of it and then join in the channel and contribute as well. Rather than trying to ping-pong discussion between one or more individuals with daisy-chained @replies, using a simple #reply means that people not in the @reply queue will be able to follow along, as people do with Flickr or Delicious tags. Furthermore, topics that enter into existing channels will become visible to those who have previously joined in the discussion. And, perhaps best of all, anyone can choose to leave or remove topics that don’t interest them.

Source: “Groups for Twitter; or A Proposal for Twitter Tag Channels”, Factory Joe

I’m quite keen on the notion of “metaprogramming” against the Twitter OS - largely related to the various hooks we’ve built for LittleGrams. Curious if Chris’ model could work, I attempted to setup an account to no avail. Chris’ approach relies on the # (pound) symbol as the marker that a channel tag is ahead. Unfortunately, there is an implicit meaning to the # in URI-based systems which could be a source of conflict going forward.

But wait! Twitter does allow us to register names that have the _ in them. To give this a try, I’ve registered _littlegrams on Twitter. I’ll attempt to use this as a channel for making announcements regarding the product - the actual littlegrams account is used for posting to the application. I am ok with the signal that an _ is meant to be channel as opposed to @ being direct.

That being said, I’m just not sure I want this in my stream in general. I see Stowe’s taken to using them in his tweets but I find the whole affair a bit messy. Twitter serves up too small a triscuit for any real meat - and that’s a strength, not a weakness. In fact, what I would prefer to see is some pre-processing happen on messages. Let me explain using LittleGrams as an example.

For our system, we wanted more robust messaging via Twitter, however, for a number of reasons (efficiency, security, etc) we opted to work via direct messages. To this end, you could say that we setup a Channel Director. With our app, you send a message to the director like so:

d littlegrams word bye-bye

Our system polls for the commands and then is able to parse that into two distinct things: an instruction on what to publish and a notification back out to the network. If we were to adopt this to the current problem set, I might be able to do this:

d _channel #barcamp #chris+messina Can’t wait to get to the Block!

As we’re doing, a processor for _channel could be setup (or Twitter could offer one) that was able to make the channel descriptors into metadata instead of direct data. The message that would be broadcast out to those individuals following either of these channels would be a short, cruft-free message:

Can’t wait to get to the Block!

The other thing I like about this approach is that it quarantines someone’s accounting work. While tagging is a great thing that continues to subvert systems everywhere, I think it is still largely personal. That may fit well with the nature of most Tweets today, but is that the future?

I think that all the other mechanisms Chris has are awesome and could easily see them working out well, especially if the fine folks at Twitter can make the dream into a reality.

That’s my 20 cents. For some more background, check out Stowe and Brian’s posts.

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