Twitter Tagging26.04.09
Earlier this week I was out for drinks with some ridiculously smart people, when the topic of monetizing twitter came up. Since we are all active users, we all had an opinion on how this could be accomplished, with ideas ranging from the often suggested pro account, to data sales, charging corporate users, charging for unlimited API calls, or some form of a “freemium” model.
While our opinions on the topic varied enough that we would never be able to agree on a consensus for monetization, we did agree on two fundamentals; twitter will be purchased at some point in the future & there are lots of great tools twitter could add to the service to improve the core functionality of broadcasting bits of useful/concise information.
When I got home I was thinking some more about the notion of possible tools that could enhance the idea and had an idea – “Twitter Tags”.
Not to be confused with Hashtags, twitter tags would simply be a way to add meta-data to your tweet stream so you sort your own tweet history and keep track about you talk about without adding a bunch of messy tags to the public facing tweet.
I know for me personally, and for many others I have talked to , Twitter is used almost like StumbleUpon/Digg/any other social bookmarking application – that is – a way to share cool things you have found and at the same time save them for viewing later.
I know that there have been countless times when something relevant to what I have tweeted has come up in conversation, and I say “oh! let me find it”, only to have to search my entire history before I can find the information in question. If there were a way to append tags to tweets just like pictures or blog posts, it would make searching/sorting your own history much easier add at the same time bolster the already powerful real-time search with the service provides.
Anyhow, as the adage goes, pictures are worth a thousand words, so rather then trying to explain further how this idea would work in reality, I simply threw together some mockups of how it could be implemented in practice. Check’em out!
Click on the images for a full sized (ie. legible) version.
How "Twitter Tags" could be implemented on the user homepage. The addition of tags would be completely optional.
How the "Twitter Tags" page might look. Tags would be sorted by popularity.
…Now if I could only find someone to code this up for me 
Hey Chris,
Love the idea! I think that would be a very valuable addition to twitter (and even something I would probably pay a small fee for as well). I can think of many different things I would love to be able to go back and search.