Making something people want

The more I use Twitter, the more I wish that Scoopler already existed! As the list of people I follow grows, I seem to increasingly turn a blind eye to the high profile twitterers, who seem to post the most frequently. This is ironic, considering the reason I am following these guys is so that I can keep track of the latest tech news, and the freshest memes. The problem is that only about 1 in 10 of these posts is interesting to me. In contrast I read my (actual) friend’s tweets religiously.

Speaking to a few twitter users, I know that this problem isn’t unique to me. There’s also been some recent talk in the blogosphere of twitter spam increasing and developers have been quick to realise that there is a need to organise the Twitter information better. Quotably, Tweetmeme, TweetScan, AlphaTwitter and more recently Twitlinks are all websites which aim to make sense of the tweetosphere. But, what does this all have to do with Scoopler? Well, we are currently working on a prototype of Scoopler which will begin to tackle this problem.

We had been trying to work out what the essence of Scoopler is over the last few weeks, the feature that made it really unique, which we can demonstrate easily as a prototype running on top of the Twitter API. Two features really stood out:

1) A location focused service which shows a user a events in their location and the tweets about those events. The service would connect people who are sharing the same experience of an event, so that they can discuss it via microblogging as it happens.

2) A Digg like website for the microblogosphere where users can highlight posts about interesting events in real time. As Mike Arrington points out, Twitter is already a great source of breaking news, because the real time nature of microblogging means information is dispersed faster than via blogging and mainstream media.

Option (1) is a bottom up approach to Scoopler, and is actually the path Buzzspotr, a service created by London based startup i-Together, is taking. Buzzpotr was featured on TechCrunch UK last month, when the service was mothballed, but I have been in touch with Jof recently, who has assured me that they’re working on resuscitating it. Given that we have just under a week to put together a prototype to demo, when we’re in the valley, building a location based service seemed a little too ambitious! So, we decided to go for Option 2, with the KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid) principle in mind. Building a Digg for the microblogsphere was actually our original idea, so after a month of Biz Dev it’s good to know that we haven’t lost sight of our vision. The prototype will run on top of the Twitter API, as well as plugging in to Twitter’s public stream via Jabber.

How will it work?

When you are twittering and you want to share a piece of news like a product launch, you “scoop” your post and it appears on Scoopler’s front page. Scoopler users can rate scoops and comment on them. We forward those comments back to you on Twitter and if you like someone else’s post you can scoop it too. If your post is rated highly and there’s a lot of discussion about it, it will stay on the front page. The aim is to create a source for breaking news, especially experiences of events as they happen. We’re working out the mechanics of how scooping a post will work but its going to be dead easy, I promise! To make sure we don’t lose sight of what we want to achieve, we actually put together some mock-ups of what Scoopler might look like. Check out the homepage and the page for an individual scoop and tell me what you think.

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Tags: AlphaTwitter, buzzspotr, microblogging, Quotably, scoopler, silicon valley trip, Tweetmeme, TweetScan, TwitLinks, twitter