Obviously, I am not alone in feeling overwhelmed by content as I mentioned in my recent post, Content Overload. Based on an article from the November issue of eCampusNews, there is now a Web 2.0 tool to help control the content on Twitter. The web developers at Purdue University have created a new tool called Need4Feed that will help you find the most popular and relevant items on Twitter.
The program was road tested recently at the HighEdWeb 2009 conference. It allowed those in attendance to find the tweets that were the most popular without having to wade through all the others manually. The article mentions that the academic world has not embraced Twitter and cited a study that stated that 69% of the faculty respondents did not use it in any way. The reason for this lack of use seemed to be because a large portion of the tweets are meaningless comments that distract from the valuable content.
The staff at Purdue took this to heart and embraced the challenge to improve the Twitter tool. By helping to find the valuable content and make it clearly visible, they are hoping that the faculty will use Twitter more as a teaching aid.
It is also important for librarians to know about add-on tools like this one. They can bring them to the attention of others and show them how to make the technology work more efficiently. A recent Pew study found that 19% on the internet user are also using Twitter so knowing how to make more efficient use of Twitter is something that may help our patrons.
If you are interested in a free subscription to eCampusNews, here is the link.
December 9, 2009 at 7:50 pm
[...] most recent external comment was a reply to my post on Need4Feed and Twitter. I think that Twitter has an automated search feature that looks for content about Twitter or maybe [...]