Just ran across another Web service that is a derivative of Twitter – Twibes. A Twibe seems to me be closely related to a Twitter hashtag but I'm still trying to figure out the concept. To start — mostly to experiment with — I've created two Twibes — one for tweets, news, etc. by and about the House of Commons and one for the news by and about the Parliamentary Press Gallery.
What is a Twibe? Here, from Twibe's help page:
A twibe is a group of Twitter users interested in a common topic who would like to be able to communicate with each other. On each twibe's page, there is a list of twibe members. There is also a tweet stream that lists tweets from twibe members which contain key word tags. Tags are set by the twibe founder and are listed just above the tweet stream. You can browse through twibes that have already been created by going to www.twibes.com/twitter-groups.
Let's examine the 'Twibe' concept in practice from the point-of-view of someone who wants to generate content for the Twibe and someone who simply wants to monitor content by and about the Twibe.
Content generators:
This is simple. If want to tweet about the House of Commons — say with short bursts of info about the latest goings-on on Question Period — I would include the three digits HOC in my tweet. The case is important here: It must be three uppercase letters. That's it. Now, I've also got a hashtag going – #HOC. The content generation rule there is the similar: I need to put #HOC in every tweet for it to show up for those following the #HOC hashtag. (I should note that here at the Oliphant Commission we have a Twitter hashtag going that looks like this #oli). So far as I know, though, hashtags are case-independent. In other words, #HOC is the same as #hoc. The critical element is that hash sign.
There appears to be one important rule for Twibe tweets as opposed to hashtag tweets: You cannot tweet more than one Twibe URL at a time whereas you could have multiple hashtag references. In other words this tweet is legal for Twibe:
Iggy just asked Harper a question HOC
This tweet is bad for Twibe:
Iggy just asked Harper a question HOC ParlPressGallery
This tweet is fine for hashtaggers:
Iggy just asked Harper a question #HOC #liberals #roft
But Twibes do something, hashtags don't: If you sign up for Twibe (and you must have a Twitter account to do so), you can arrange to have Twibe content delivered to you via e-mail.
Content monitors:
You don't need to have a Twitter account to see content generated under a hashtag. Simply go to search.twitter.com , search on the hashtag and then, if you so choose, subscribe to the RSS feed for that hashtag. You can now monitor tweets on this particular hashtag in your favourite RSS reader like, for example, Google Reader or Bloglines.
You do need a Twitter account, though, to take advantage of monitoring content on Twibes, so far as I can tell. But the bonus is: You can then choose to monitor content via e-mail, via theTwibes home page, or through other options — including, if I read this right, a weekly update from your Twibe group. That flexibility sounds useful to me.