I got to see some of the Twitter press shindig via live video (thanks, Scoble and Ustream!) last night, rolling out the new Twitter.
One of the points made in the introduction had to do with new users finding others to Follow quickly and easily.
And I was sure I would see this (excuse the typo!):
I smell something to do with Categrories coming for discovery.
Mike Cane
mikecane
But no.
Here’s the thing, although in my account I tweet a lot about eBooks, digital books, books, and the like, there are also tweets that are conversational.
However, I think some people out there would just like to see my book-related tweets and skip the rest.
This is where Twitter just missed the boat.
According to a post over at TechCrunch, it will soon be possible to get a popup for tweeting:
Well what about being able to customize that to include category metadata?
Then my own tweet box could look something like this:
And people could then Follow that subject on Twitter instead of me as a person?
Let me tell you I’d like this too because sometimes I get annoyed by “off-topic” tweets too from people I have no relationship with.
I don’t know how Twitter could pull this off. I leave that up to the coders.
But I also think there should be something that broadcasts a hashtag for people to rally around for certain topics. For example, with the recent New Zealand earthquake, the hashtag #eqnz was agreed upon quickly. What if Twitter could broadcast a tweet to everyone to tell them that was the hashtag to use/Follow?
If Twitter is indeed moving towards becoming a media company, it better get its metadata act in order — because metadata rules everything.
Mike Cane’s xBlog 
I would like this. A Lot. That is all.
Are you aware of Twitter Annotations? When this was announced, Twitter said it would be ready in the summer, but so far, no release date has bee set. My understanding is that part of the reason is that the Twitter dev team discovered that metadata wasn’t as dumb-simple as they expected it to be.
I remember some buzz about it but after that, nothing, so I ignored it. Some people have New Twitter today and the FAIL Whale has popped up on me 3x so far. Metadata I think would bring Twitter to its knees. But it’s still needed!
> However, I think some people out there would just like to see my book-related tweets and skip the rest.
Well, yes. That’d be me.
I mean, the rest of the stuff is plenty entertaining, but there’s just more of it than I can keep up with. Some days the tweet stream felt like 40% mike. That’s hard to justify at work.
Twitter probably has their hands full at the moment, though. Would you maybe just want to hashtag something consistently? Until they catch up to you?
e.g. #epub or #ePrdctn. Or maybe #mikepub.
I’ve been trying to tag eBook tweets with #ebooks now. Use Search Twitter for that:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=mikecane+%23ebooks