List Suggestions for You - the next Twitter feature?

With the twitterverse expanding at an mind-boggling rate, the challenge of identifying relevant and interesting content is becoming ever-more difficult. To combat this challenge, Twitter recently announced its new Suggestions for You capability that helps you identify interesting people to follow. The natural extension of this functionality would be for Twitter to make List Suggestions for You.

At TweetPivot we hope Twitter is already working on this feature, as list suggestions would be a great compliment to the functionality in TweetPivot that allows you to interactively explore lists.   If anyone from Twitter is reading this, we'd love to hear your thoughts. In the meantime, however you discover new lists, you can use TweetPivot to help determine if the list is for you or not. 

Follow @TweetPivot on Twitter for more list-based innovation coming soon... 

Tweet Pivot joins Microsoft BizSpark

We are extremely pleased to announce that Tweet Pivot has been accepted onto Microsoft's BizSpark program.

The potential that this program gives us (through software, support & visibility) to make huge leaps forward with our development cannot be under-estimated.

Watch this space!

Discover Lists with Tweet Pivot

We've just added a great new feature to Tweet Pivot - the ability to pivot someone's Lists. Firstly, if you don't know what twitter lists are you should read Mashable's guide.

All you have to do is enter a user's screen name and, if they've created any, their lists will be displayed under the usual links to their friends and followers. Hovering over the "Lists" button will expand it to show the actual lists.



What's exciting about this development is the added richness that's apparent from pivoting lists as opposed to someone's friends or followers. People in lists tend to be, at a minimum, interesting - otherwise they wouldn't be in it. We've also found that the quality of the Klout data we import seems to be much better across a collection of list members compared to collections of friends or followers.

This new feature opens up some amazingly rich veins of twitter data. A very quick web search found this article by Marshall Kirkpatrick on Read Write Web: 10 Twitter Lists You Should Follow. Here are links to the Tweet Pivot collections based on the lists in the article.

1. Patrick LaForge: Linkers
2. Josh Elman: Awesome Social
3. Robert Scoble: Founders
4. Rebecca Leaman: Nonprofit Geeks
5. Chris Grayson: Augmented Reality Peeps
6. Mike Taylor: XMPP List
7. Raven Zachary: iPhone List
8. Christina Braden: Disability List
9. Ben Turner: Anthropology List
10. The ReadWriteWeb: Team List

As always, please tell us what you think and, if you like Tweet Pivot, retweet us.

Off to a Flying Start

It's only 24 hours since we published the new Silverlight version of TweetPivot. This made it available to anyone running a 'modern' browser. In just that short space of time we've had over 150 new collections built and almost 500 unique visitors.

So far the site has coped admirably with the increased load and we haven't had any reports of collection requests failing - everything's been built.

We've also been receiving lots of great, positive comments and exposure from users. Special thanks to Pete Brown who posted a great tweet to his 2000 followers.

By far the biggest negative comment we have received has related to the speed of generating new collections. It takes about 3 minutes to generate a collection of 1000 twitter users. We know that this is far too long and are working hard to resolve it. Technically:

"Every profile image of every user in the collection needs to be converted to a Deep Zoom Image. Once all these have been done they are then all combined into a Deep Zoom Collection. The first part of this process is very intensive and, unfortunately, doesn't seem to run well in a parallel environment. In fact, when utilising .Net 4's Parallel Task Library it actually doubles the conversion time! This process is currently responsible for over 75% of the overall time it takes to create and deliver a new collection."

Finally, a huge "thank you" to everyone who has shown interest in TweetPivot. We have a mountain of amazing new features that we can now start adding to the application. Follow us and we can keep you informed.