Twitter have today started rolling out a Beta feature to select users called Lists. To me this is the most useful feature that Twitter have added since they launched. I’ve had my Twitter account since March 2007 and during that time I’ve accumulated a whole bunch of followers. The problem with this is that Twitter has, over time, become far too noisy for me and I’ve lost my ability to follow what’s going on.

As a result I’ve used Twitter more for updating than for following but Lists now change this. As you can see from my sidebar I can now create both public and private lists. This means that I can now create a private list just for friends and instead of seeing all the noise I can just view stuff from people that actually matter to me – my friends.

You can also see that I have created an Afrigator Team list. This list I made public so anyone can view this list and follow it if they want to. As with following individual Twitter profiles you can now follow a list and be updated on that lists stream which is pretty useful. What lists also do is allow you to know who are part of a team. Twitter have a team list as well so you can now follow people from a company or cause that matter to you.

Twitter has just become a whole lot more useful to me and I think it’s a game-changer! How many of you have access to Twitter Lists?

One of the biggest problems we’ve had is that we sit with more than 12,000 users but we’ve had no way to connect these users together. We’ve had numerous requests to allow peeps to connect with other like-minded African users and for a long time we’ve been trying to figure out the right way to do it.

When we sat down to work the model out Stii had this ingenious idea to buy Twitter so, we made them an offer. Unfortunately our offer of R250,000 was rejected and the result is that we decided to build our own platform instead.

At first glance Gatorpeeps may appear to be competing with Twitter but let me assure you we’re certainly not trying to compete or steal Twitter users but rather leverage off the technology to enhance our existing product.

In truth we modeled a lot of Gatorpeeps off the best that both Twitter and Jaiku had to offer. Twitter has certainly brought micro-blogging to the mainstream and Jaiku revolutionised community interaction and we wanted to bring the simplicity of both into our offering.

So the question then is if we have such amazing micro-blogging platforms already why would we need another? Well, in a review of ten micro-blogging platforms ReadWriteWeb had this to say in their conclusion:

Micro-blogging isn’t a short-term trend – it is here to stay. The evolution of blogging has spawned this new mini version of blogging and many are latching on. The simplicity and ability to post frequently are what attract most to the concept. We expect much faster adoption and mainstream penetration than blogging in general.

I believe this is even more true in Africa as we simply don’t have the penetration that other developed countries have. Also take into consideration that the mobile phone remains the African version of the PC and as such micro-blogging addresses both penetration and accessibility problems. If you take Gatorpeeps into this context, couple it with the fact that less than 5% of Afrigator users have Twitter accounts then you’ll see why launching a micro-blogging platform to our audience is in fact a wise move.

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.

Using hashtags will not only enable better twitter following for the event but it will also allow users who are not attending the conference the opportunity to watch the events unfold and using hashtags is really simple.

1. You’ll need to follow hashtags on Twitter so that hashtags can pick your tweets up. Visit the hashtags user and click follow.

2. When you tweet from the event add #newmedia08 to your tweet so that hashtags picks your tweet up.

When you tweet with #newmedia08 in your post it will automatically appear on the newmedia08 hashtags page which any user can follow.

Let’s try it out and see how successful hashtags could be.

HelloTxt is a simple service that allows you to post a message directly to Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Facebook and Plaxo at the same time. Now one has to ask why anyone would need this functionality but I find myself in a situation where I have an account with all of these sites and posting messages to each one individually is not only a mission but also not happening.

Over time Twitter has become my medium of choice simply because it has the highest adoption rate in South Africa for micro-blogging platforms. Personally I prefer Pownce over all these services but there are almost no people using the service that I know.

The HelloTxt service works brilliantly and does what it claims to however the down side to it is that you can only post messages from the HelloTxt website. This is a major issue for me as I prefer to post messages via Instant Messaging and after doing some research I found that there is no way to integrate this service into an IM client.

In a random set of events I stumbled upon Twhirl, the micro-blogging application to rule them all. Twhirl is primarily a Twitter application that allows you to post to the site and the latest version also includes integration with Jaiku and Pownce.

The Twhirl desktop application uses Adobe’s Integrated Runtime (AIR) that enables a cross-platform experience that is gaining big traction with developers and users. One AIR application I use religiously is the Google Analytics Reporting Suite and I’m sure there are many more cool applications out there.

Twhirl features multiple Twitter accounts and once you’ve added one you’re presented with a super-cool interface with full Twitter functionality including; replies, direct messages, favourites and re-tweeting.

By clicking on the settings icon on your Twitter window you can change various settings including adding your usernames for Jaiku and Pownce.

What is really smart about this integration is that replies to Twitter users (i.e. @username) are not posted to either Pownce or Jaiku. As a user of all three services I quickly became aware that replying to someone with the @ symbol is a unique Twitter way of doing things and Pownce evangelists hate it when you try and reply to them in this fashion. This is sure to keep your Pownce buddies happy.

I’m loving Twhirl and I’ve finally found a micro-blogging application that works the way I want it to.

While Pownce has a very similar profile page to Twitter the overall structure seems more intuitive to me. There is a bio of who I am, better structured friends listing plus the added column of other social networking profiles that I belong to.

The site is still in Alpha stages so I’ll forgive them for only having a choice of four themes to select from.

One of the best tools I like about Pownce is the Social Network profiles. There is a selection of almost every social network site out there and you can setup all the ones you belong to. You also have the option of adding your Instant Messenger contact details as well as various websites that you own.

The net result of this is a Profile box which appears on your main profile page.

Website aside I think Pownce’s best value comes in the desktop application they’ve created. Instead of writing their own software Pownce decided to build their desktop application using Adobe’s Integrated Runtime (AIR) environment.

AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to use existing web development skills to build and deploy rich Internet applications for the desktop. The result is a really slick user interface that just works.

From the desktop application you can send messages, links, files (up to 10MB) and create events that can go to individual contacts, all friends or the public in general.

What has become clear through applications like this is that if Twitter is to survive it better start playing catchup as Pownce and Jaiku are hot on their heels.