Info 202 Fall 2011

Keeping track of relevant and interesting data proves to be quite a challenge in the seemingly endless river of information that social media platforms, such as Twitter, generate.  To help alleviate this sense of information overload, Twitter users can “follow” and create lists of other users to organize the information that interest them into manageable chronological streams.  Aside from these built-in features, third-party services provide other ways to arrange tweets.  For example, twistori groups tweets by feeling and bettween groups tweets by conversation.  A new service, Twylah, puts their own spin on organizing Twitter.


Twylah provides a place where brands (individuals, celebrities, and companies) can exhibit their Twitter content in a categorized way.  The service programmatically arranges and groups a user’s tweets by frequently used topics, hashtags, and media types and creates a page for each set of tweets.  This system supplies a way for brands to “slow down” the flow of information on Twitter by keeping grouped items from several topics visible all at once.  Tweets that may have been lost on the chronologically arranged and linear Twitter timeline can now be featured among other tweets that are of interest to the brand’s constituents. Twylah’s system gives brands an opportunity to cater their content to target specific audiences by adjusting the subject matter and frequency of word or tag usage.  For example, the UC Berkeley Twylah page (pictured) currently features topics such as Football, Game, Colorado, and GoBears due to a football game that happened recently. The Twylah topics for each brand will change from day to day depending on what the user tweets, allowing followers to keep track of the latest and greatest information relevant to their interests.  Twylah shows potential for leveraging Twitter for brand marketing and eventually organizing Twitter in general once the planned expansion to enable topic grouping from all users as a whole instead of per user is launched.

Link to article: Bringing Order to Twitter Chaos: Tylah's Topic Tracker