Dwigger: one of the most interesting social media experiments of the year
Obvious statement: there’s a lot of information and conversations floating around the internets. Not-so-easy questions to answer: what do we do with it, how do we harness it, and how do we make sense of it?
An area of social media that I think about a lot these days is the prospect of pulling data – usually in the form of RSS feeds – into social media platforms with the idea of… doing something interesting with it. It’s a fascinating means to try to make sense of the bustling, chaotic, and never-ending conversations that are taking place today.
Enter Dwigger, a site that gives us “threaded conversations and voting for Twitter. As Paul Glazowski at Mashable writes: “Twitter feeds plus threaded replies plus voting. It’s Twitter, Diggnified.”
Now, you can look at Dwigger in a few ways. You can say: big deal, it’s Twitter with threaded comments and voting. If FriendFeed added voting, there’d be almost no need for this site.
I don’t see it that way at all. While the site has just launched, already you can filter conversations by a dozen or so geographic regions, such as Germany, San Francisco, or Australia. Using this as a basis, I see the potential to drill into the “twittersphere” and pull out conversations based around discrete parameters as extremely powerful.
The central question here is whether or not people will care about browsing through a “fire hose” of pulled tweets from Twitter based around filters, and voting and commenting on the ones they care about. The success of FriendFeed in particular, I’d wager, says that there is a marketplace for this kind of social media interaction.
Dwigger’s on my radar as one of the most interesting experiments going on in online media this year. Can’t wait to see how it progresses.
