Dance With Strangers

The two tools I could not live without, or at least when it comes to my Twitter, are TweetDeck and Seesmic. Both appeal to me for different functionality and I use TweetDeck for @kyleflaherty and Seesmic for @breakingpoint. The main reason I like both applications are their ability to help me build personalized lists of people I follow, even before Twitter lists became a Twitter web UI feature. For example, in TweetDeck you will find six lists I have built:

1. Good Friends
2. Marketers I Trust
3. Colleagues
4. Boston Sports
5. Foodies
6. Austin Peeps

Building these lists allows me to follow more people and focus on certain topics, but it has also expelled any thought of visiting the main Twitter site. Nor will I check my full list of people that I follow since I don’t like to give up that real estate in TweetDeck. And herein lies one of the pitfalls of lists (whether within Twitter or in an app), because once I build those lists I rarely add new people, since I’m only looking, well, at those lists. I love my lists, they are full of great information and great people. But with your lists you don’t know what you don’t know.  My lists were missing people. People that I knew.

It finally hit me during a run. Yesterday as I was hitting my stride on a long distance jaunt I actually started thinking about Dave Fleet. Now, I’ve never met Dave personally, but we have had several conversations on Twitter and our respective blogs over the years. I’ve always liked the way Dave thinks and how he challenges people consistently, but in a productive method. Dave is a self-described “running nut”, hence why the run jogged my memory (sorry, had to), and I realized at that moment that I had forgotten to add Dave onto any of my lists in TweetDeck! As soon as I was back at the house I remedied this egregious error and realized I needed to go through my lists closely to make sure I’m not missing other folks like Dave. People who I have enjoyed talking with over the years and who teach me a great deal.

Here is how I’m going to do it:

1. Batch review my mentions (people who used @kyleflaherty) from 2007 and 2008.
2. Analyze trends to determine frequency of communications in order to find those I talked to the most.
3. Cross-reference this with my lists in Tweetdeck (now that they are interlinked with lists in the API).
4. Find the other Dave Fleet’s I’ve been missing.

Is this problem simply an element of my own lack of vision or something inherent in list building? Oh, and hey Dave, I have a few questions about stretching after a long run for you