Aggregating Organizational Tweets

ComT­weets (@comtweets) is a (free) ser­vice that orga­ni­zes a Twit­ter com­mu­nity around a com­mon email address, like Face­book orga­ni­zes net­works. The sta­ted goal is to faci­li­tate “easy dis­co­very and com­mu­ni­ca­tions bet­ween cowor­kers.” This is not unlikeYam­mer’s goal, but Yammer’s con­ver­sa­tions are vie­wa­ble only by peo­ple in the net­work (com­mon email addres­ses). Of course, this means adding yet another social net­wor­king account to your plate.

Launched in May 2009, ComT­weets lets “the world” see ever­yone who has elec­ted to affi­liate their Twit­ter account with their emplo­yer. And it is very easy to set up a new net­work on ComT­weets: you simply sign up with your work email address. The first per­son to sign up gets to set up the orga­ni­za­tio­nal account, like so.

When you asso­ciate your Twit­ter account with an organization/network, ComT­weets asks if this is a per­so­nal or orga­ni­za­tio­nal account. The ques­tion cau­sed me to stum­ble, as I first thought “this” refe­ren­ced the ComT­weets net­work. Then I rea­li­zed that ComT­weets was asking about the Twit­ter account that I was asso­cia­ting with the email address. That’s when I knew I was to select “personal.”

Con­se­quently ComT­weets appends “emplo­yee” beneath my Twit­ter ava­tar when it dis­plays my tweets. Note: it does not dis­play @replies.

It’s pos­si­ble that ComT­weets could have two net­works for UW, as we have two dif­fe­rent sets of syn­tax for the same email address — uw.edu and u.washington.edu. We’re pro­bably not the only large net­work with an issue like this, evi­den­ced by this June blog postexplai­ning how to merge net­works.

If your web­site or blog allows javasc­ript, you can easily dis­play tweets from the aggre­ga­ted feed.

There are a few large-ish com­mu­ni­ties on ComT­weets but in the main the num­bers are small:

• CNN: 20 twit­ters, 21,915 tweets, 5,892,228 reaches
• Com­cast: 27 twit­ters, 7,726 tweets, 51,929 reaches
• Goo­gle: 76 twit­ters, 35,898 tweets, 1,831,262 reaches
• IBM: 153 twit­ters, 68,875 tweets, 112,776 reaches
• Mic­ro­soft: 276 twit­ters, 183,891 tweets, 570,308 reaches
• Sapient Inte­rac­tive: 1 twit­ters, 149 tweets, 126 reaches
• Tem­ple Uni­ver­sity: 1 twit­ters, 59 tweets, 248 reaches
• Vir­gin Media: 4 twit­ters, 8,528 tweets, 1,269 reaches

What do you think? Use­ful or not?

This post first appea­red at Wired­Pen.

Tagged as: comtweets